


Stepping Stones

by Potboy, SeekingIdlewild



Series: Stepping Stones [1]
Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Angst, Bodyswap, Demisexual Character, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Romance, demisexual Rush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-26
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-06 06:24:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 77,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1847752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeekingIdlewild/pseuds/SeekingIdlewild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The creators of the Ancient communication stones had never planned for <i>this</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Because let's be honest, this fandom was in crying need of a bodyswap fic.

There were a few unspoken but generally understood rules associated with Telford's visits to Destiny via the communication stones. First, nobody should remind Telford that Eli had hundreds of hours’ worth of potential blackmail material - otherwise known as “documentary footage” - stored in Destiny’s system and backed up on his laptop. There was no telling what scandals Telford could unleash back on Earth armed with information gleaned from even a small sampling of those kino recordings. Second, it was probably better not to mention the fact that the new medicinal herbs currently flourishing in the hydroponics lab, in additional to their usefulness as painkillers and muscle relaxants, produced an extremely pleasant state of euphoria when ingested or smoked. And it was definitely not necessary to inform him that a contingent of the science team had selflessly volunteered as human subjects to study the effects of the aforementioned herbs. Extensively. For science.

Perhaps most importantly of all, Greer, whether on or off duty, was to stay away from Telford unless Young was present to act as a buffer. Preferably, Greer and Telford would never come into contact at all. In fact, if an excuse had to be made to send Greer out onto the hull in a space suit for the duration of Telford’s visit, that could and should be arranged.  

In Greer’s defense, he had done nothing new to provoke Telford since his first offense on Icarus Base. But the three years out of contact with Destiny’s crew had not done anything to soften Telford’s temperament or blur his memory of old grudges. If anything, in the months since Destiny’s crew had awakened from stasis, Telford had managed to make more of a nuisance of himself than ever. From Greer’s perspective, it seemed like Telford had given up any pretext of friendship with Young, and that he regarded Rush’s every word and move with a degree of suspicion that went beyond even what Greer considered appropriate. As for the man’s feelings about Greer, those were uncomplicated and obvious to anyone. Telford hated him, and Greer returned that sentiment in fucking _spades_.

So when Telford marched into the mess, wearing Young’s body, accompanied by Rush’s body with someone who certainly wasn’t Rush in it, and Greer had not been told to clear out, he knew this was not something that had been run past the Colonel first.

Now, Greer didn’t know what the hell Telford’s problem was, other than the all too obvious fact that he was a dick. That was okay. He didn’t need to know the ins and outs of it - that sort of thing was for Camile and her kind to figure out. All he needed to know was that the man was an enemy, and that it fell to Greer to protect the Colonel and by extension the rest of the ship from his inevitable machinations.

He put down the spoonful of mashed bitter-potato to free his hands, shifted his weight forwards, hoped the motion would be covered by the fact that everyone else in the room had also stopped, looked up.

Everyone knew Telford was trouble, but the top brass kept sending him anyway. All by themselves the fingers of his right hand curled into a fist. And Scott took him by the wrist and pulled.  “Stand down, Sergeant.”

“You know about this?” Greer asked, just in case it was legit after all. But the LT looked a little queasy himself. It was no surprise when he shook his head and the same certainty that nothing good was happening colored the wariness in his eyes.

“You let me deal with it. That’s an order.”

Pft. Right. But keeping a low profile until he found out what exactly was going down might work out best. He picked up his spoon again as Scott turned to Telford.

“Sir? Is there a problem?”

“No problem,” Telford’s smarmy smile looked even worse on Young’s face than it did on his own. “Doctor Rush has been removed from the Icarus project and replaced with Doctor Rodney McKay, of whose outstanding work in the Pegasus Galaxy I’m sure you’ve all heard.”

Oh. Oh well damn. Sliding along the bench to put himself in deeper shadow, choking down a cold splash of discomfort, Greer took a closer look at the person behind Telford. You’d asked him before this, he’d have said it would be satisfying to see Rush carry himself like the geek he was instead of the hard man he wanted to be. But there was something kind of pathetic about looking at the little guy now and seeing the nervous, open eagerness to be praised, the defensive twitches of a professional victim.

Rush was a wolf in ram’s clothing, but this guy, this guy just looked like a particularly self-satisfied sheep. He gave an awkward wave of acknowledgement and then ducked out of the room. Embarrassed to be looked at? Or up to something?

“Did Colonel Young agree to that?” said Scott, asking the right questions in the right disbelieving tone of voice. Maybe he’d make something of that boy one day after all.

Telford shook his head, with a condescending blend of pity and contempt.. “The longer this goes on, the more you people forget you’re in the Air Force at all. Colonel Young’s agreement is immaterial…”

Which meant that Colonel Young had _not_ agreed.

“And Colonel Young himself is being retained on Earth for the foreseeable future while an investigation into Rush’s probity is carried out.”

You see, he’d hoped he was wrong. Greer slid off the end of the bench and into the unlit patch where the moulding of the door blocked the dim floor lights. But he never was. And while he wouldn’t want to wish away the Colonel’s tendency to excessive forgiveness - he’d profited from it himself, after all - it certainly kept Greer busy. Someone had to step in and deal with the people on whom it was wasted, and Greer was not ashamed to be very good at that.

“So you’re..?” Scott was keeping Telford’s attention. Good man.

“I am in charge now, Lieutenant. I want you to set up a briefing in the gate room. Everyone on board to be there. I’ll address them in half an hour.”

 _I don’t think so._ Greer waited until Telford stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and Scott for emphasis, and then he slipped around the pillar of the door and was out in the corridor, heading for the stones room, before Telford got it into his head again to sling him back in his cell.

 

* * *

 

“You can’t _do_ that!”

Eli’s voice reached him as he rounded the corner outside the stones room. The kid sounded scared and indignant the way he did when some serious shit was going down. Greer put on a burst of speed, skidded around the doorway and into the room. Found McKay there, bending over a laptop that was plugged into the stones console, and damn if that prissy look wasn’t the worst thing Greer had ever seen on Rush’s face.

He drew up by Eli’s side, weight on the balls of his feet, not stopped, just paused. “What is he up to with that thing?”

Eli flashed him a ‘thank God you’re here’ look. “He says he has orders to alter the stones protocol so the connection can’t be broken. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t even know _what_ he’s doing.”

“That’s because you are a badly educated loser who wasted his life on games, while I am a genius who has been studying Ancient technology for a considerable number of years--”

Eli jutted his jaw and narrowed his eyes, but he spoke to Greer rather than to McKay, like he’d given up on making the other man see reason. “He _can’t_ know what he’s doing because there isn’t a manual. It’s all guesswork. _Nobody_ knows for sure, certainly not enough to be fiddling around experimenting with them while a connection is in place. You remember Ginn and Amanda Perry being stuck in these things for weeks after their bodies were dead? Did anyone know that could happen, I don’t think so!”

Greer remembered that just fine. Truth was the stones had always given him the creeps, and if Eli said McKay didn’t know what he was doing, then McKay did not know what he was doing. He drew his gun and took aim at Rush/McKay’s shoulder. “You stop whatever it is right now and back away. Stop it now, you hear me?”

“It’s fine,” McKay spread Rush’s hands in a placatory gesture. “Look, I don’t particularly want to do this either, but that’s what I’ve been ordered to do. So…” He retreated as Greer advanced, his eyes fixed on the gun, his expression an unlikeable mix of fear and high-minded contempt, as though a threat to his life counted as a moral failing. Like he was disappointed by it. “Don’t take it out on me. Because I’m just… I really see what Telford meant about a hostile working environment, now. I must say he rather understated the severity of the situation.”

Greer took in the set up of computers around the stones console - a bunch of different colored wavy lines. Lots of math scrolling up the screen. It didn’t mean jack to him. But there was an easy-enough way out. Get Young back, let him sort it.

He pulled his sleeve down over his fingers, reached out-

“No, don’t do that--” McKay held out a warning hand, and curiously, behind him, Eli covered his mouth with alarm.

Greer pulled the first stone off the plate and tucked it back in its foam recess. Pulled the second.

“Oh, no, no, no,” moaned Eli, lurching forward to check the monitors. “He was right in the middle of something. We don’t know what kind of effect--”

McKay froze. Rush’s eyes closed in the long blink of a change of consciousness as the way he held his body slowly shifted, gaining an impression of heaviness, gravitas. His shoulders slumped as though under a weight.

“Oh,” Eli looked up from the computer screen with an exhalation of relief. “Oh, maybe we’re all right after all. According to this, they’re both back.”

Which showed you what you got for relying on technology too much. Because Greer - Greer would have recognized that slouch anywhere. Well shit.

“Doctor Rush?” Eli asked, when Rush did not immediately spring like a jumping jack into action and blame.

Rush opened his eyes slowly, his face very still. He looked at his hands, turning them over as though he had never seen them before. Then he reached up to lay his right palm over the scruff of his beard.

“No,” he said carefully, with the faintest intonation of humor. “It’s Young. Sergeant, what the hell is going on?”


	2. Chapter 2

Unexpected body swaps were always disorienting, but as Young had just discovered, making an abrupt, unplanned transition from one borrowed body into another borrowed body was about ten times worse. His initial spike of nausea was thankfully ebbing away now, but the disorientation lingered. His mind, which had grown accustomed to donning new skins as necessary, had not been prepared for this particular set of circumstances. He wondered absently if Rush was handling it any better than he was, and then realized that he had no idea what body Rush was currently wearing. His? It seemed odd to hope that that was the case, but none of the alternatives sounded good.

Nothing about this situation sounded good, actually, and Greer hadn’t even started talking yet.

“Telford announced a few minutes ago that McKay was going to take Rush’s place here on Destiny,” Greer began.  

Oh did he, now? Well, that was certainly news to Young. Nothing like _that_ had come up while he was on Earth, but to be fair, his meeting with General O’Neill had only just gotten past the preliminary stage when his consciousness had been so rudely yanked back to Destiny.

“So,” Greer continued, “I come over here to see what McKay is up to, and I find him... tinkering.  He told Eli he was trying to make the connection between him and Rush permanent.”

“And I said he had no _idea_ what he was doing, because no one actually knows anything about how the stones work or even what they _do_ , exactly,” Eli cut in. “And there’s really no _telling_ what could have happened, because--”

“Okay,” Young interrupted, “I don’t need a play-by-play, just tell me what brought me back to the wrong body.”

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence during which Greer and Eli exchanged glances, and then Eli said, “Well, we don’t know, exactly.  That’s what I was trying to--”

“I deactivated the stones,” Greer said.

“Yeah, but that was just the trigger,” Eli said. “It was whatever McKay did that caused this.  I’m just… not real sure what that was.” He grimaced.

Young glanced over at the box containing the communication stones. They were all present and accounted for, and he felt vaguely mocked by their orderly presentation.  

“The thing is,” Eli said in that sort of slow, reluctant tone that never boded well, “the stones really are inactive now, and according to the data I’m looking at, you should be in the correct body.”

Young thought he had a pretty good idea of where this was going. “He wanted to make the transfer of two consciousnesses permanent,” he said wearily. He could feel his neck beginning to tense up with strain. When he reached back to massage the tight muscles, he was momentarily disconcerted by the feel of Rush’s fine, soft hair under his fingertips. The same hair that was sweeping across his cheekbones, giving him the unsettling sensation of tiny insects crawling across his skin. Why the hell didn’t the man get a hair cut? Was it vanity or sheer indifference?  

“Well, not exactly,” Eli replied. “He just wanted to make the connection unbreakable. But I’m not seeing any connection at all, here.” Eli tapped at the screen in front of him.  

Young squinted at him, fighting to organize his thoughts through his mounting headache. “So…?”

Eli scratched his chin thoughtfully. “So this is just a guess, but I think the next time we drop out of FTL, you won’t switch back,” he said, and it was clear from his eager tone that his scientific curiosity was overcoming his sense of the calamity which had just taken place. “You’ll stay in that body, because it’s pretty much home base for you now.”

Young glanced at Greer, who had up to that point been maintaining a neutral expression. But at this announcement, his face twisted in evident disgust. “Excuse me sir, but that is _fucked up_.”

Yeah, Young wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of this becoming permanent, either. For one thing, he had just aged by six years, and that didn’t seem quite fair, somehow. For another… well, there were scores of reasons why it would be inconvenient to wear this underweight, under-trained body forever.  

But at least he wouldn’t have to live with long hair forever, if it came to that. Young tried out one of the little head tosses that Rush seemed to perform unconsciously. As he suspected, it was only a temporary fix; the displaced hair slid right back into his face within seconds. He sighed.

“Are we certain that Rush is actually in _my_ body?” He asked, because that seemed like a vitally important fact to establish right about now.

“That’s easy to find out, at least,” Greer said, looking slightly relieved at the prospect of having something to do. Or perhaps he was feeling some twinges of guilt at the part he played in Young’s current predicament. Young was going to have to figure out how to handle that later. Technically, Greer had disobeyed orders. But Young was grateful for his intervention, especially if the alternative had been that he and Rush had gotten stuck in the wrong bodies on Earth rather than on Destiny.  

Young nodded at Greer, who turned and disappeared into the hallway. Young suspected he wouldn’t have to go very far to find Rush, if it was in fact Rush in Young’s body. Rush would be on his way to the stones room now, as eager to find out what the hell was going on as Young had been. How he would handle the news that his stay in Young's body was likely to be of extended duration, and possibly permanent, Young could only imagine.

“Whatever McKay did to those stones, you're going to figure out how to reverse it,” he told Eli.

“Yeah, okay,” Eli muttered, “I'll just start randomly experimenting on them too. I'm sure that won't have any horrific consequences. I mean, it turned out great for you guys, right?”

“Just _fix_ it,” Young growled. Somehow, it just didn’t have quite the same menacing effect in Rush’s voice as it would have in his own.

 

* * *

 

In his free time - such as it was, these days - Rush enjoyed working on the particle/wave theory of calamity. If he posited that luck was a force along the same lines as electromagnetism, with the opposing poles of good luck and bad, then it must be possible to isolate its causes and predict its effects to some degree. For example, in his experience the military were a prime example of a negative luck generator. When he had arrived on Earth for what had been billed as “just a simple check up. It’ll take five minutes,” and found himself surrounded by frowning men with guns and no access to O’Neill at all it had been immediately apparent that this was already a kilo-fiasco if not worse.

Since - contrary to the action of magnetism - bad luck attracted more bad luck, he couldn’t say he was exactly surprised when, just as he was gearing up for a fight on Earth, he found himself yanked from one body to another, opening his eyes to find everyone in the ship gathered below him in the gate room, glaring at him with hostile expressions. Someone had fucked up. Someone had fucked up as they were wont to do as soon as his back was turned, and now it would be up to him to put it right.

“I don’t know what you lot are staring at,” he said. “I didn’t call you here.”

His voice! It came from low in his abdomen. He could feel it rattling round his chest and throat like little stones. He didn’t recognize it at first because he hadn’t heard it from the inside before, but the sound and the feel of it prompted him to look down. Black boots, black trousers, the name “Young” embroidered on his shirt. He flexed his hands, feeling the stiffness of a broken finger, badly healed and aching.

Well now. Wasn’t this a turn up for the books.

“Colonel Young?” A couple of steps down from him, Scott gave him a complicated look. Probably of hope.

He wondered if he should say ‘yes.’ But his experience with the Lucian Alliance proved that just being in the right vessel was not enough to convince. Humans were remarkably adept at spotting the consciousness inside it. Which made for an interesting existential question, but… not right now.

“That would be convenient,” he said, dismissing the muttering crowd from his notice, turning to go. “And so not true.”

“ _Doctor Rush_?”

It was hardly rocket science, was it? He and Young had been sent to Earth, if it wasn’t Young who had returned, who else could it have been? Honestly you’d have hoped Scott might have reached that conclusion five minutes ago and gone on to something of actual value.

Adjusting for the body’s different centre of gravity and weight, he walked out of the room, and when he felt confident began to jog in the direction of the stones.

Scott caught up with him. “Doctor Rush, where are you going?”

And good God he didn’t have time for this. “You are an officer of the United States Air Force, yes? So that means you must have had at least some kind of formal education. How about you try exercising your doubtless remarkable powers of observation and deduction to answer that question yourself?”

Infuriatingly, Scott gave him a sympathetic look and pressed the air down with his hands as though he was pressing down the barrel of an invisible shotgun. “Look, I can see you’re upset, but--”

‘Upset?’ He wasn’t ‘upset.’ It was simply clear that something untoward was going on, probably involving Telford. Telford could not be pried off the stones, had undoubtedly swapped with Young and immediately assembled the whole crew for an announcement. That had the flavor of what had been done to them during that first disastrous dial-home attempt. Telford had the clout to arrange for Rush to be held on Earth while someone else handled the scientific side of the affair.

One had to admire how the man learned from his mistakes. Rush had foiled him before, so this time he had been careful to replace Rush too.

God, anger felt solid in this body, supple and volcanic and sweet. He tasted it with pleasure and then let it go, careful not to be distracted. So far so typical. But then something had happened with the stones. Part of Telford’s plan? It didn’t seem likely.

Belatedly, he remembered Scott. Oh yes, he’d been having a conversation. “I’ll give you a clue, shall I? There has clearly been a mix-up with the communication stones, so…”

“We’re going to the stones room.”

He made a gesture intended to convey the sentiment _there you are!_ _See what you can do when you exert yourself._ Didn’t feel he carried it off with quite his usual panache in this more clumsy form.

Scott grimaced for some reason. “You couldn’t have just said that?”

_I shouldn’t have had to._

Greer skidded into view, running full tilt. Rush rolled his eyes to find himself flanked by the two of them. The Bill and Ben of Destiny, just what he needed.

“Sergeant Greer. Let me guess. There’s been a malfunction on the stones. Young and I have returned to the wrong bodies and you’ve been sent to find me. So you can omit that part and tell me everything else. What has been happening here?”

Greer exchanged an ‘oh, it’s Rush all right’ look with Scott. “Some fucked up stuff, man. Let’s get you all in the same room before we talk.”

Which was efficient enough a suggestion that he complied.

The sight of… himself brought him to a halt in the doorway with a bark of laughter. He’d seen himself from the outside before, of course, during that incident when there had been two of him, and that had been disconcerting enough. But this, with his body and Young’s mannerisms - what a mongrel creature it was.

Rush was taller than Young now. Only an inch or two, but what a difference it made, literally looking down on the man. He hadn’t tested this body out to discover the limits of its strength, but he - oh, he had experiences enough to take an accurate guess, and this was glorious. The boot was literally on the other foot, and Young must be asking himself, at this very moment, what would happen if Rush took the opportunity for revenge.

He got close because he could, because it was fun to force Young to look up to meet his gaze. But he wasn’t a savage - he didn’t take it any further than that.

Young’s mild, ironic smile looked unimpressed. Rush recognized the expression as one that meant ‘I know what you’re doing and it won’t work.’ But Rush had inside information and he knew it would. It was a constant of human nature that no one liked being loomed over - that no one who was loomed over felt it without a certain twist of apprehension, of low, primal fear.

In that respect, Young had a lot of poetic justice due.

“I hear there’s been another cock-up in my absence.” Out of habit, Rush reached back to dig the heel of his hand into his aching neck muscles, only to realize that his ever present headache - so continual he had learned to disregard it entirely - had disappeared. His neck was fine too.

Had he really thought this was bad luck? On the contrary, it was delightful.

“Here’s the situation as I understand it,” said Young, attempting to hook Rush’s hair back behind his ears. “Telford came on board with McKay. He told Scott and Greer that McKay was to replace you on Destiny permanently…”

 _He did what?_ Rush’s amusement dived headfirst into liquid nitrogen. McKay? That lascivious buffoon? McKay who’d had the nerve to criticize his equations to all and sundry on Langara and then fail, utterly fail to make any kind of connection at all? McKay on _his_ Destiny? Over his dead body.

Young was still talking. What was he saying?

“...investigations into your ‘probity’. As a result, Telford was going to replace me for the duration of the hearings.”

It was a fucking witch-hunt, that was what it was. Oh, they’d leave him alone to toil away in obscurity on some godforsaken little planetoid with the rest of their rejects, as long as he wasn’t in any danger of actually succeeding. But now he’d found something good, something valuable of his own, they wanted to take it away. Of course they did. They always did. He should have known it from the start.

If he had been in his own body, he would be shaking now. He knew the texture of his own anger intimately, the fine tremor under the skin, the stir of hairs along the back of his neck and the heartbeat fluttering at the back of his tongue. The need to move itching down his limbs like spiders in the bone marrow. But this came out of silence, rising up out of darkness, sleek, full, burning like a bubble of lava, and it was so extraordinary, so all consuming that his mind recoiled from it as if scalded.

Wait one moment. He attempted to take a mental step back from this body and gather himself. The experience of the stones had never been like this before, never been quite so immediate, so visceral. But then he had been, as it were, remote piloting his host. Now, he was embedded, and it seemed the equipment ran its own subroutines when he wasn’t looking. That might prove to be a problem.

Taking a deep breath, he unclenched his hands from around the table edge and attempted to think, still scattered, unsettled by the intimacy of his own physical reactions.

“I’m not going to let that happen, Rush.”

Perched on the edge of the table where the stones sat smug in their box, Young managed to do a good impression of his usual stolidly reassuring tone, even using Rush’s tenor voice. There was a moment, just a moment, when Rush wildly dared to believe it - remembered being tumbled out of a glass prison and into hope. He remembered reluctant confessions that had lead to astonishing alliances. With a choking ache that hurt too much to examine closely, he remembered that he had asked for help once, and Young had given it.

That had been a fluke though. It did not do to expect that kind of thing on a regular basis. Rush had learned very early in life not to set himself up for that kind of disappointment.

“And how exactly do you propose to stop it?”

Young shrugged, and it was odd to see his own limbs move so slow, as if they were moving through clear water… and he was dropping that metaphor right now.

“First we get this stones problem sorted out so you and I can go back to our own bodies.” Young turned his head to give Eli a pointed look, half admonishing, half encouraging. So very _him_ that Rush wanted to charge him rent for using Rush’s poor innocent face like that.

“Then I send someone back to Earth, tell them that you stay and that’s non-negotiable.” Young shook his head, looked like he regretted it when it made his hair swing forward and into his eyes. He grimaced. “The brass want McKay on board, he can come on board _as well_ \- I got a dozen civilians who’d be happy to exchange with him full time. But they don’t get to take you off unless you decide for yourself that’s what you want.”

Or to summarize - Young’s plan was to get the stones working again and then hope he could change his superiors’ minds by pleading with them. Pathetic and unworkable. Re-open their access to the ship, and they would send someone - O’Neill himself perhaps - whom none of the military would dare disobey. Then Rush would be forced at gun-point back to Earth to stand some kind of jumped up trial, and his work would be taken away.

Rush needed to be rational about this. He needed it especially now that his hands were shaking and he wanted to hit something with this body just because he could. He needed to be calm. In control. No one believed in the mission like he did, no one cared with the single minded passion it needed. It was up to Rush and Rush alone to make sure he got to keep this one thing. It had always been up to Rush alone.

He nodded slowly, as though he were considering Young’s reassurance with the seriousness it deserved. His thoughts felt faintly slurred, sluggish, and his mood grim, but that was hardly surprising. Turning to Eli, who stood by his open laptop regarding both of them with a wide-eyed look, sympathetic and yet fascinated, he asked, “I assume you recorded what happened during the transfer?”

“Duh. Of course I did. But like I was telling the Colonel, the stones are inactive right now. This…” Eli held out both palms as if offering Rush to himself, “Is pretty much you. And while I don’t want to be quoted on this, I’m thinking a system reset could solve everything else and give us contact with Earth again.”

Which would be the worst of all worlds and could not be allowed.

“No, no, no, that would be much too dangerous,” Rush’s mind finally spun up to speed, he swung back into action with a feeling of relief. There had been a moment there when he was afraid his cognitive capacity had been affected.

“We don’t know what the results might be of being hosted in someone else’s body on a permanent basis. The pressure of a strange consciousness forcing the brain to rewire to adapt itself to profoundly new ways of thought? It could lead to psychosis, brain damage, stroke…” He shook his head, rather pleased with the spur of the moment rationalization. It sounded genuine enough to convince.“We’ll do as the Colonel suggests. Fix this problem first. Then worry about Earth.”

Step One: get the military out of the room. That ought to be easy now they had been assured of prompt obedience, though perversely enough, Young did not look convinced. That long level stare of his was more hawk than lion, from Rush’s eyes, but disconcerting nonetheless.

It gave him a twinge of cold under the heart to be suspected again after these last few months of trust, but he… he couldn’t afford to think about that right now. “Show me your data, Eli. Gentlemen, this may take some time. We’ll be sure to tell you when we have something worth reporting.”

They didn’t go immediately of course, because that would have been useful. Young lingered awkwardly, like he was trying to think of something to say. And if he didn’t go soon, Rush would have to think about the way he kept sliding his hands through Rush’s hair - and that was just a token of the way he must be gradually getting to know what being Rush felt like, just as Rush was gradually learning what it was to be him.

He didn’t want to think about that either. He turned his back on the three of them, bent over the computer, caught the reflection of his face in the screen and shut his eyes for a heartbeat before he could waver.

Behind him Young sighed. Footsteps heralded the military’s departure. Step One achieved.

Step Two: prevent Telford and McKay from ever coming back, and prevent himself from ever being forced to leave, by disabling the stones permanently. If that meant stranding him in a younger, stronger body, so be it, he could live with that.

He might never be able to look at this face again without thinking about what he had done to Young… But it wasn’t as though _he_ had done it. No need to be melodramatic. McKay and Greer had done it between them. Rush was as much a victim here as Young was. He must not lose sight of that fact.

Step Three: make sure nobody found out about Step Two.

In a moment of irresolution, he thought about the bridge, Eli’s expression of utter betrayal, the anger that had pulsed from the whole crew, pervading the ship, in which he had had to breathe, eat and sleep for weeks afterwards. They would not take to this well either, being permanently cut off from their loved ones, being finally utterly on their own.

But it might focus their minds at last on what was important - on the mission. He could sell the mission to them as the only way of ever returning. It was high time that umbilical cord to Earth was cut and people began to accept that this was their home now. He was doing them a favor, really.

“Let’s run a systems check on the base, and then on each stone individually.” That would take seven hours, more than enough time for Eli to grow bored and wander off. At which point he could take out a few vital expressions from the code and the job would be done.

“So, ‘probity’ huh?” Eli gave him a friendly sideways grin. “Who do you reckon ratted on you to merit that one?”

The only one he could rule out was Young. For all his faults, Young was not the kind of man to sneak around behind anyone’s back. He favored the straightforward, headlong attack. Rush appreciated that. Other than Young? “I don’t know, Eli. It could have been anyone.”

“Yeah, you’ve not really been flavor of the month for the past four years.”

Rush laughed, startled by the growl of it. That was true enough. He was really rather surprised he hadn’t yet been lynched. Hence the vital importance of Step Three.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Walking in a borrowed body had never required any conscious thought before now. Young had just set one foot in front of the other, same as always, and any necessary adjustments for differences in height, weight, and build seemed to happen automatically. This was a little different. He found himself having to curb a restless urge to cover ground rapidly in long, purposeful strides instead of moving at his usual deliberate pace. This awkward tussle between conscious intention and physical instinct was entirely new and more than a little unsettling.  

By the time he had rounded the corner into the hallway that led to his quarters, he was beginning to feel like he had reached a workable compromise between Rush’s quick, light gait and his own more ponderous tread. He hoped the result didn’t make him look ridiculous, but that was probably unavoidable regardless.  

It appeared that having his consciousness planted in Rush’s body had not imparted to him any of Rush’s lithe grace - that effortless fluidity of movement that Young had often noticed and even appreciated for its aesthetic appeal. He had a feeling he could adapt over time - this body _wanted_ to move according to its usual habits, and it was only the intrusion of his displaced mind that kept it from doing so - but that was hardly the goal here. Rush was right. This was something new, something the creators of the communication stones had clearly never intended, and there was no telling what the long-term physical and psychological impact of taking up permanent residence in an unfamiliar brain and body would be.

The thought of Rush brought with it a vague sense of discomfort. Young had left the stones room reluctantly, and there was still some nagging part of him that wanted to turn around and go straight back. He told himself that there was nothing he could do to help, that he was needed elsewhere, and yet there had been something in Rush’s eyes - or rather, in Young’s own eyes, turned unusually sharp and calculating--

Young’s train of thought was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Camile from an intersecting hallway. She shot him a shrewd look, head tilted, and then offered him a smile that was equal parts weariness and cynical amusement. “Colonel Young, I presume?”

Young sighed inwardly, reluctantly abandoning his plan to spend the next fifteen minutes on his couch, staring at a wall, processing what had just happened to him. Just fifteen minutes to quietly panic and then pull himself back together, that was all he had wanted. But no. Life on Destiny didn’t pause just because the commander had just gotten stranded in the wrong body and was facing what promised to be one hell of a fight with Homeworld Command over the future of his chief scientist. Time to suck it up, pretend that he was not experiencing a chaotic internal tug-of-war between his consciousness and his host body, and start addressing the other problems that faced him.

“Camile,”  he replied, attempting to return her smile. He had a feeling it came across as something closer to a grimace, but it was the best he could do at the moment. In addition to all his other sources of discomfort, the ache in his neck and the pounding in his head had only increased since he had first become aware of them. “I suppose you must have been present for Telford’s announcement, then?”

“Oh yes,” Camile said ruefully, “we were all there for that, _and_ for Rush’s sudden appearance in your body. There’s a bit of an uproar over it all. It’s been an eventful day, and there haven’t even been any aliens involved.”

“We don’t need aliens,” Young muttered. “We make our own fun around here.” He started moving toward his quarters and Camile fell into step beside him.

“What went wrong with the stones?” she asked predictably.

Young reached back to rub at the base of his neck, trying to soothe painfully stiff muscles. “McKay did something to them while trying to make the connection between himself and Rush permanent.  Eli--”

“Permanent?” Camile interrupted, halting mid-stride. She turned on him with an expression that was both startled and, to his interest and approval, deeply troubled. “I wondered what Telford meant when he said Rush was being replaced with McKay. I couldn’t figure out how they were going to manage it, although I should have guessed. But to force Rush to live out the rest of his life in someone else’s body… that’s such an extreme violation of personal autonomy that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it. Is it even possible?”

Young shrugged. The motion sent little bolts of agony through his neck and into his skull. _Jesus._ Was this normal for Rush, or did it have something to do with the malfunction of the stones? He might have to see TJ about this if he was going to be stuck in Rush’s body for any length of time.

“I don’t know, but apparently Telford thought so,” he said, trying to maintain a neutral expression through the spike of pain. Judging by the mildly confused look Camile was giving him, it wasn’t very convincing. “McKay didn’t have time to complete his work. Greer found out what he was doing and broke the connection. Which, all things considered, I’m grateful for. But as you can see, Rush and I got kind of… switched in the process.”

Which brought to mind the very interesting question of whether Telford and McKay had returned to the correct bodies on their end. Young entertained himself for several moments with the idea of Telford trapped in McKay’s soft, undisciplined body before he dismissed it. Not his problem.  

Camile started walking again, more slowly this time, and he followed. She shot him another searching look, and this time there was a hint of concern in her eyes. “Can’t you and Rush use the stones to change back?”

“Rush and Eli are working on that right now.”

Camile hummed and nodded. “And… how are you?”

Young gave a weak laugh that sounded even more pathetic in Rush’s softer, higher voice than it would have in his own. “Honestly, I’m a bit traumatized, and I’ve got a real bear of a headache,” he admitted.

They had reached his quarters by this point, so he slapped the door control and ushered her into the room ahead of him. “I really need to ask you a favor, Camile,” he said, trying to keep his delivery matter-of-fact rather than desperate. He wasn’t sure how well he succeeded. “Several, in fact.”

Camile crossed her arms loosely in front of her and settled herself on the back of his couch. He dropped onto his bed facing her. They regarded each other speculatively for a few moments.

“I think I can guess one of them, at least,” Camile said finally. “You’re hoping I can get the IOA involved on Rush’s behalf. They probably have the best chance of getting Homeworld Command to reverse the decision to remove Rush.”

He nodded.

Camile looked off to one side, apparently considering it. Her thoughts played over her face in a series of small tells - a slight frown, pursed lips, a twitch at the corner of her mouth. Then she met his eyes again. “I can try.”

“I know he’s not exactly a favorite with the IOA--” Young began.

Camile snorted at the understatement.

“--or with you, for that matter.”

“That’s hardly the point, I think,” she said. Her tone, while calm, was tinged with a low, smoldering kind of anger that Young could readily identify with. “We’re talking about forcing someone, against his will, to relinquish control over his own body. Stargate Command spent the better part of a decade fighting an alien race that made a habit of doing just that.”

It was a good angle to start with, but Young wasn’t sure he found it entirely convincing. “Well, to play devil’s advocate here,” he pointed out, “the Goa’uld took control of bodies still occupied by their original owners. Homeworld Command will make the argument that they’re offering Rush a perfectly functional body in exchange for his.”

Camile raised an eyebrow at him. “And how’s that working out for you, Colonel?”

He bared his teeth in a humorless grin.  

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she said quietly. “It’s not _his_ body, so it’s not an equal exchange. And when you take into account the dangers of living on this ship, it becomes even more problematic. If two people were permanently connected and then one of them died, wouldn’t the other die as well?”

Young absently brushed Rush’s hair out of his eyes (it immediately slid right back into place, goddamnit) and rubbed the back of his neck. “Presumably,” he said, considering the point.

“How do you rate McKay’s chances of survival against the threats we face out here compared to Rush’s?”

“I don’t know McKay well enough to judge, although the man is a bit of a legend,” Young said. “But Rush is about the hardest son of a bitch to kill that I’ve ever met.”

He chose to ignore the pointed look Camile was giving him, one that clearly said ‘and you’d know, wouldn’t you?’ “At any rate,” she said aloud, “Rush’s life would forever be at the mercy of McKay’s choices, and it’s unconscionable to subject him to the dangers inherent in that kind of connection against his will.”

“There’s something else that worries me,” Young said, and then hesitated. Camile looked at him expectantly, but he let the silence expand and thicken the air between them before he finally broke it. “I wouldn’t expect this to weigh with the IOA or Homeworld Command, but for us, at least, it should be a real concern.”

“You’re worried about how this would impact Rush psychologically,” Camile guessed.

“I _know_ how it would impact him,” Young said quietly, meeting her eyes steadily from under a curtain of unruly, grizzled hair. “It would break him.  Destiny and the mission, that is what he has. That is what he lives, eats, and breathes. I don’t know what he would do if he lost them forever, but I know what _I_ would do if I lost my last shred of hope, Camile, and it terrifies me.”

Camile shifted her weight slightly and stared back at him meditatively. Then her lips quirked into a strange little smile. “You care about him,” she said, and her tone was a complicated blend of surprise, doubt, and curiosity.

Possibly. Definitely. Definitely, in that Young didn’t want Rush to end up killing himself out of spite because everything he had ever cared about had been ripped away. Definitely, in that Young had trouble imagining life on Destiny without that infuriating, irascible genius swaggering up and down the halls like he owned the ship and was sharing it with the rest of the crew out of the benevolence of his twisted little heart. Definitely, in that Rush had become so intertwined with Young’s perception of Destiny’s mission that he had trouble untangling the two concepts in his mind. But none of that had any bearing on this conversation. At all.

“I care about every member of this crew,” Young said, dropping his eyes. For the first time, he was glad to have Rush’s hair to give him a little bit of privacy while he collected his thoughts. Maybe _that_ was why Rush kept it long. “And he’s definitely been acting more like a real member of the crew recently. I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but things are getting better.

 _Much_ better. So I’m certainly not going to abandon him to what, for him, would be a fate worse than death.”

“But as you said,” Camile said quietly, “that isn’t likely to influence either the IOA or Homeworld Command in their decisions.”

“Right,” said Young, rising to his feet. He began to pace back and forth across the center of the room, unconsciously giving in to the restless energy that belonged to this body and not to himself. “So we lead with the ethical argument, and then sell them on Rush’s credentials, his level of dedication to this mission, and the contributions he’s made since arriving on Destiny. No one knows this ship like he does, no one has spent as much time going through Destiny’s database as he has, no one wants this like he does. And now that he’s working in partnership with the rest of the science team, _and_ with you and me--”

“You can’t tell me that you really trust him completely,” Camile interjected. “He still could be keeping any number of secrets from us and we wouldn’t know.”

“Eli would know,” Young said.  

Camile tilted her head to one side and offered him a faint smile. He didn’t know if that meant she put less faith in Eli’s ability to detect Rush’s machinations than he did, or that she simply found his confidence in the boy endearing. It could go either way, really.

Young sighed and came to a halt in front of Camile. She looked up at him thoughtfully, brows lifted in an unspoken question.

“This is not just about protecting Rush,” he said, allowing conviction to color his tone. He liked the effect it had in Rush’s voice, so flexible as it was, so capable of conveying emotion. It did lose a bit with Young’s flat American delivery, but that didn’t matter. He had Camile’s attention. “I truly believe that Rush’s place is here, on this ship. This is where he belongs. And I might not always trust him, but I trust in his vision.”

“That’s a good line,” Camile said. “Maybe I’ll use it.”

“Maybe don’t include the part where I still don’t necessarily trust him.”

“No,” Camile agreed, “but that part about believing in his vision. I like that. That will play well with the IOA, I think.”

“Good,” he said, smiling as he began to feel marginally more hopeful. This would be an uphill battle, but at least he had Camile in his camp.

Camile’s expression lightened in response to his smile, and there was an unmistakable twinkle of humor in her eyes. Laughing inwardly at whatever he was doing to Rush’s face at the moment, he suspected.  

“This is weird, isn’t it?” he asked.

Camile laughed outright at that, and he felt momentarily warmed by the clear, bright sound of it.

“Creepy, even?” he prodded.

Camile shook her head. “Rush in your body, _that’s_ creepy,” she said. “You in his? It’s actually kind of cute.” Her smile turned vaguely apologetic.

He blinked at her. No one had called him _cute_ since he was five years old. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it.

“Slightly pathetic,” she added, “but cute.”

“Oh, thanks,” he grumbled. He pushed his hair out of his eyes - _again_ \- and tried to tuck it behind his ears, but it was much too fine and slippery to stay where he put it. Nothing at all like his own coarse, wiry curls. A thought occurred to him. “Camile, you don’t happen to have a pair of scissors, do you?”

Camile’s eyes sharpened at the question, and she stretched out a hand as if to ward him off. “Oh no,” she said. “I refuse to be an accomplice to any crimes committed against Rush’s hair. Especially not while he’s in _your_ body.”

Ah. Well, there was _that_. Young thought of a looming presence encroaching on his personal space. He thought of the nervous flutter of his pulse, the stiffening of the muscles in his back, the narrowed focus of his vision. He thought of the instinctive internal shrinking of prey facing a known and formidable predator. And most of all, he thought of gazing up into his own face and seeing satisfaction radiating from the foreign presence behind his own eyes.

He understood what Camile meant. Probably better than she did.

“You think he’d be mad, then?” he said, brushing the unsettling memory aside. Rush had just been enjoying himself. Making a point. There was no reason to suppose that there would be a repetition of that little performance.

Camile shrugged. “He might not care at all. But if someone borrowed my body and cut off my hair, I’d toss them out an airlock.” She softened the threat with a smile, but the fact that she had made it at all showed how far she had come since she had arrived on Destiny. The old Camile had not casually joked about murder. It went to show what living under the constant threat of calamity did to a person.

“Well, I guess we won’t do that, then,” he sighed, abandoning the idea with reluctance. He massaged his neck again, desperately willing the spasming muscles to relax.

“Colonel,” Camile said after a pause, “you don’t look like you’re doing well.”

He really wasn’t. The excess energy that had sustained him up to this point seemed to have finally dissipated. He felt achy and weary and overwhelmed, struck once again with the magnitude of what had taken place and the uncertainty over whether it could be fixed. He walked back to the bed and dropped onto it, rubbing at his face with both hands. But the sensation of Rush’s scruff against his palms was an unpleasant reminder of dark days when Young had given up on his own personal grooming in the depths of his depression, so he let his hands fall into his lap. “It’s… a bit of an adjustment,” he said.

“I imagine so. You said there was more than one favor?” Camile reminded him.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “Can you tell everyone what happened to me and Rush? And let them know that Rush is _not_ going to be replaced?”

“I can do that.”

He nodded his thanks. “Now I need to talk to Scott. Fill him in on how we’re going to tackle this Rush issue.”

“I can do that, too,” Camile offered. “Honestly, you look like you need a nap.”

Young huffed out a bitter laugh. “I need a lot of things right now, Camile.”

She smiled sympathetically and rose to her feet. “I’m serious. I’ll talk to Lieutenant Scott and pass the word around to the rest of the crew. And I’ll be on standby to meet with the IOA whenever the stones are fixed. In the meantime, try not to torment yourself over all of this, okay? I know how you are.”

 _‘Try not to torment yourself.’_ That was a bit like telling him, ‘try not to breathe.’ He could make the attempt, but it would probably only last for about thirty or forty seconds before he gave up. But he nodded anyway, grateful to have her assistance, and grateful for the period of solitude she was offering him. Maybe he _would_ take that nap. He felt like he hadn’t slept in days. Knowing Rush, it was quite possible that he hadn’t.

He let Camile to show herself out. Once she was gone, he pushed himself to his feet and went to stand in front of the tarnished mirror that he used for shaving. A stranger looked back at him from the glass. It wasn’t him, but it wasn’t really Rush either.

Young deliberately relaxed his face, letting all expression bleed away until even the ghost of his consciousness flickered out like a snuffed candle behind Rush’s dark gaze. There. Now it was Rush staring back at him.  Rush, with bones like blades and eyes like windows on a starless void, his fifty-two years recorded in lines and furrows across a canvas of tanned skin.  

“We’re going to put this right,” Young whispered to the man in the mirror. “All of it.  I promise.”


	4. Chapter 4

_They find him on the edge of the playground where the ground dips into a shallow trench and shrubs provide cover from prying eyes. For nearly a week it’s been his quiet refuge, but he knew he couldn’t stay hidden here for long. They always find him eventually. And then come the taunts, the threats, the clumsy hands pawing at his satchel or snatching his books from his grasp. If he gives in he’ll never see his books again, and he’ll take a beating either way. It’s better to fight back, to get hit, to protect what belongs to him._

_Tom finds him first. It’s always Tom who leads the pack. He’s the biggest, and also the stupidest. He wouldn’t know maths from the profane scribbles on the walls of the boys’ toilets, but he knows how to throw a punch. Three other boys trail behind him, but their names aren’t important. They’re just the scavengers, waiting for a fresh kill. They’ll hang back, wait until he’s beaten, and then they’ll swoop in and make themselves feel strong by kicking him while he’s down._

_His pulse quickens and his stomach lurches, but he stares defiantly up at his bigger classmate. He never cowers on principle, and he’s learned not to run. Burdened by his heavy bag, with its weakened seams and broken strap, he can’t rely on his one advantage - speed - to save him. And he isn’t about to leave his books behind. They are all he has. They are who he is. They are more important than a few black eyes and split lips ever could be. So he stands his ground and adopts a scornful expression to mask the fluttering fear inside._

_The first blow comes as a surprise, unheralded by the usual barrage of unimaginative insults. He staggers back, cheek smarting, stars bursting before his eyes. Already he can taste the metallic tang of blood on his tongue. The next strike comes before he has time to regroup or counterattack. It slams into his gut, stealing his breath and making him gag. He’s going to be sick. He’s going to be sick at the feet of this useless, brainless piece of garbage, and he’s never going to forget the indignity of this moment._

_He bends over, retching, and a well-timed shove sends him sprawling into the dirt. That’s when Tom’s friends appear, circling like vultures. The ensuing rain of fists and feet is relentless, pummeling him into the ground where he fell. His fingers claw at the earth beneath him as he tries to gain leverage to roll away, to escape. It’s never been this brutal before. Never so overwhelming, nor so humiliating. And never before has he felt panic squeeze his throat like this, strangling his vocal cords until he cannot release the cries of rage and pain that echo within his mind._

_By the time the boys tire of their pastime and leave him shaking on the ground, he is certain of only one thing. This_ cannot _continue. Whatever it takes, regardless of the cost, he must ensure that he will never be this vulnerable again. Tom and his friends are strong, but he is clever. He can’t beat them at their own game, but perhaps he can change the rules._

_It’s his only option._

 

* * *

 

He came awake with a wounded cry, hands fisting in the bed sheets and body curling protectively inward. Phantom pain and borrowed fear made him shake uncontrollably, and for a few moments he couldn’t figure out where he was or even who he was. All he knew was the dream, and the outrage and helplessness and shame that came with it. Not just a dream: a memory. An old, ugly little episode in the life of one Doctor Nicholas Rush that he would rather tuck away forever in some dark crevice of his psyche and never examine again.

As he grew more aware of his surroundings, his trembling eased and his mind quieted. He was lying on his bed in his quarters on Destiny. He was safe. He was--

“Colonel Young?” Eli’s voice crackled from the radio on the bedside table.

He was Colonel Everett Young. _Fuck_. He was _not_ the little boy who had been beaten up repeatedly in school. He had _never_ been that kid who was too smart to be popular, too smugly superior to be tolerated. And no matter what body he currently occupied, he was definitely _not_ Destiny’s resident chief scientist. But for a little while there, he had genuinely been confused on that point.

Greer was right. All of this was _fucked up_.

“Um, Colonel Young? Come in, please,” Eli said a little more insistently.

Young rolled toward the end table and made a grab for the radio without bothering to sit up. He misjudged the distance, sending some unknown object flying off the table. It hit the floor with a resounding clatter. Great. He didn’t have the energy to find out what it was and whether it had survived the impact, so he decided that he could probably live without it.

“Go ahead, Eli,” Young said after his second attempt to retrieve the radio proved more successful.

“You’re needed in the stones room,” Eli said. When Young didn’t answer immediately, he added, “Um, right now would be good.”

Young suppressed a sigh. “I’m on my way,” he said.  

Oh well. He hadn’t been enjoying that nap anyway.

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t that Eli was a suspicious kind of person. In fact his mom was always shaking her head at him, telling him to stop letting people take advantage. For example, she’d say it when he’d spent three days fixing a friend’s computer and missed a job interview. But she’d usually have this lurking warmth in the back of her eyes, and more often than not she made him cookies after, which lead him to believe she didn’t really mind, she just didn’t want him to be hurt by the hardness and ingratitude of the world.

So yeah, it wasn’t like he was paranoid or anything. It was just that over the past five hours, while he watched the stones run their self-diagnostics and tried to figure out as much as possible about how they worked from the code, Rush had gotten progressively more and more antsy.

That was weird, because Rush was always telling him to apply himself - always with the little digs when Eli did something for play instead of for work. You’d have thought he’d be pleased that Eli was excited enough by the mind-bending fusion of human consciousness and targeted quantum entanglement to give up the chance of dinner and a nap to work straight through.

Another thing that was weird? Watching Rush be antsy in Young’s body. All the striding about and the drumming of fingers and the crumpling up of little notes and throwing them in corners, it all seemed a tad more threatening with the extra power behind it. Watching Young’s face in fluid expressiveness - frowning, chewing at his lip, pulling to one side with Rush’s half smile? That was… going beyond weird and into just plain wrong, to be honest.

Eli slowed on the way to the mess, as his suspicions pulled at him like spider webs. Rush had said “Eli, you must be starving. Why don’t you go and get some food. You can bring me some while you’re at it.”

He’d gone more or less automatically, because it was Young’s voice that said it, and it was a Young kind of thing to say. But now his brain was catching up with his stomach, and his brain was saying “Really? Are you really going to fall for that again after what happened with Franklin? What if he’s just trying to get you out of the room? What if he’s going to… I don’t know… do some horrible kind of self-experimentation that leaves them both stranded in the body of the next passing alien? I mean it’s happened before...”

And yes, it wasn’t like Eli was a suspicious kind of person, but he wasn’t _stupid_ either. Once bitten, twice shy, right? He turned around and hurried back.

A glimmer of blue light where none should be stopped him from simply bursting into the room unannounced. What the..? He eased into the corner of the door jamb to get a better look. One of Destiny’s holographic screens hung just above the table on which Eli’s own laptop was displaying the firmware of the stones.  
  
Destiny could do that? He felt a spike of curiosity seasoned with glee - because having a virtual console _anywhere_ you wanted would be _so_ useful - but tasting mostly of disappointment. It would have been nice to be told.  
  
But this was Rush, who hoarded information like a dragon hoarded gold. Eli shouldn’t be too...  
  
While his conscious mind had been going through this little dance of anger and resignation, his subconscious had been noticing the Ancient numbers and words glowing in the air like frantic fireflies. It red flagged them to him, pulling his attention away from the existence of the screen to notice what was written on it.  
  
He read in silence for what seemed like hours, everything in him growing heavy - his leaden lungs pulling down through his chest to puncture his empty stomach.  
  
He walked in. “Is that a manual?”  
  
Rush jumped, which would have been funny in that body, but... wasn’t, right now. “I didn't see you, Eli,” he said, covering his black dead heart with his hand. “Yes, I thought there must be one, so I set a search going for it. It returned an answer moments ago.”  
  
And yeah, yeah, Eli would have bought that four years ago, before any number of things, but he knew that tone of voice now, that easy, habitual reaching for a plausible excuse. Oh, it made him mad. How many times did Rush think he could do that and not have absolutely everyone catch on?  
  
“That’s…” This never got any easier, this standing up against authority thing. Conflict, it just wasn’t for him. He had to wind himself up until he was shaking to burst out. “That’s not true, is it? How long? How long have you known about this and just not told me? I mean, I was running my mouth at Greer and Young about how nobody knows how these things work and you were _right there_ listening, and you didn’t think to say anything? You didn’t think that was something we all needed to know?”  
  
“Eli, Eli,” Rush backed away, raising his hands defensively, and smiling the ‘lets just keep these secrets between us, shall we’ smile with which he had confessed to being a homing beacon for Chloe’s aliens. “Yes, all right. I knew there must be a manual when Andrew Covel made the connection between himself and Greer unbreakable. As a scientist, he’s adequate I suppose, but he could never have come up with a fix like that on his own. You’d have realized it for yourself if you’d only thought about it. And yes, perhaps I was remiss in not sharing that with you at once but--”  
  
Apparently Eli’d been subconsciously thinking about this for the whole aborted walk down to the mess because here came another suspicion, newly minted and shiny. “So if you knew how to fix these things all along, why did you need to get me out of the room?”  
  
He made a lunge for his laptop, but Rush was faster, getting there first, hitting Enter and then shutting down the lid. Trembling with fury and adrenaline Eli snatched it from under the man’s hands, powered it on again. It took forever, and when it came back there was nothing, just an empty interface, the command gone, processed. Completed.  
  
“What did you _do_?”  
  
He couldn’t cope with this. Seriously, he couldn’t fucking cope with this... No, no. No, calm down. A man who could fly Destiny through a death star could surely manage to deal with Rush for five minutes. And besides, he ran a back up every ten seconds. He could go and damn well see for himself what Rush had done.  
  
“Nothing bad, Eli,” Rush laughed the ‘goodness, don’t be so paranoid’ laugh of the falsely accused. “I just ran the detangling program I wrote. The next time we use the stones, Young and I should return to the right bodies.”  
  
Eli loaded up his backup and sure enough, there it was - a little program. It took him a while. Two minutes according to the time stamps, but it felt longer, to read and understand the section of the manual that still glowed accusingly between them, to understand that the program replaced phrases in the stones code, at random, with similar-looking but non-functioning junk.  
  
No record existed of what had been done, only that it had been done. That the entirety of the working code of the stones had been corrupted. Wrecked as thoroughly as if they’d been smashed into smithereens with a hammer.  
  
Eli’s mind connected the dots long before his heart caught up. There was a pause like that between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder, in which he registered Rush pressing his back into the far wall, hugging himself with Young's arms, the fingers of Young's hand pressed to his lips.  
  
“Eli,” Rush began, tentatively, “It’s for the best. Believe me…”  
  
He was meant to be visiting his mom in two days. Eli reached for his radio, called for Colonel Young, his voice strained with the effort of not screaming.  
  
“Don’t…” Rush said, turning away with a grimace when he went right ahead, because at this moment he didn’t honestly care if Colonel Young dumped Rush out an airlock. His mom was expecting him in two days, and she... she hadn’t been doing well over the past three years of not knowing if he was ever coming back, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t do that to her. She’d think he was dead. Oh God, she’d be sure he was dead and she would... He couldn’t...  
  
Running feet in the corridor outside heralded Young's arrival. He padded in, quiet as the eye of a storm. “Eli?”  
  
“Don’t…” Rush implored Eli.  
  
“Rush broke the stones.”  
  
Rush sighed, and Young went very still beside Eli in a way that - even now that Young was slight and fragile-looking - sent a thrill of fear through him. Shouty Young was never the problem. This one, though, whose zero degree kelvin fury was indistinguishable from calm, this one Eli was glad was not his enemy.  
  
“He did _what_?”


	5. Chapter 5

The boy was such a toady. You’d have thought such a plump, bright boy would know better about whose side nature had designed him to be on. Rush tried to gather himself, wished he had not retreated to the far wall, from which it was an awkward dash, avoiding chairs, to get to the door.

All right. All right then. So the secret was out. Now he had to... But he couldn’t think what to do. Trying to think with this fucking brain was like trying to run in quicksand. He had to fight for every fucking foot fall and he was so…

He wasn’t scared, all right? Well, if he was, who could blame him? He could taste dust at the back of his throat, and behind his eyes he could see again the desolate beauty of a world on which he was the only living thing. Young had left him there. Young had had them sedate him and prod about with hooks by his beating heart. Young had suffocated him to death while Camile and Scott looked on, and no one, not one fucking person on this whole fucking ship had intervened. The conclusion was inescapable - Rush was disposable. Young could kill him whenever he liked, and no one would do a thing to stop it.

“Eli,” Young said, his face angled slightly towards the boy but his eyes fixed on Rush’s. “Calm down. This can still be fixed.”

“I’m telling you, it can’t!” Eli looked like he was going to cry, hyperventilating like a child. “I mean do you have any idea of the size of this program? If I... if I was to go through every single line trying to work out which bits were good and which bits were convincing looking nonsense, it would take me _years_. Like ten years at least. And I wouldn’t be able to catch all of them in the first pass. No one would.” He grimaced, its comic effect dashed by the desperation in his eyes. “Which would mean another pass of another ten years. And she’s going to be dead by then, my mom. In twenty years time we’re not going to have anything left to reconnect for.”

“Okay,” Young said, in the flat voice of a man who was done.

Rush eyed the exits again, caught sight of his own hands as he did so - square, strong hands. Oh. Oh, but that put rather a different complexion on things. Fear transmuted habitually into anger in this body, so he let it come - a clear, righteous possession of anger he could taste between his teeth like the blood of a rare steak. He was afraid, and the thing that was frightening him? He was going to tear that thing apart and beat it into the fucking dirt.

Young gathered up the stones and their base, put them back in the box, his movements very precise. He pushed the box into Eli’s chest, the boy grabbing it with the hand that wasn’t cradling his laptop. “No one’s asking you to do this alone, Eli. Take the stones, find the science team, figure out a way of putting it right. If he can break it, you can put it back together. You got this, Eli. Okay?”

Eli clutched the case to him like a comforter, his head bent as he sucked in air, trying to calm down. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. “Okay.” He shuffled to the door, turned, biting his lip as though he was reluctant to let the words out. “What about you guys?”

Rush wondered whether - lily livered as it was - that was an intervention, whether he needed to feel sorry for the lad, or grateful to him, or more likely annoyed that he thought it was necessary at all. Did none of them remember Simeon? Rush was perfectly capable of looking after himself. All the more so now he had Young’s power at his disposal.

Sometimes, for all the man’s obvious inadequacies, it felt like Young was the only one on board who knew what he was capable of, the only one who respected him at all.

“We’re just gonna have a talk.”

“I can see that,” Eli smiled nervously. “Just... don’t get carried away. You know how you are. Don’t forget you’re _Rush_ now, okay?”

Oh, the boy was worried about _Young?_ Rush had to grin. How very delightful, how good it felt on this side of the bargain - to be feared instead of pitied.

Eli left the door open behind him, but Young closed it, stood there very still - parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, looking at Rush with cold eyes. There wasn’t a trace of fear or cowering in him, and Rush was glad. He wouldn’t have liked to see his own body do that, and maybe - if he was being honest with himself - he wouldn’t have liked to see Young cringe either.

“You want to tell me what the hell you were thinking?”

No. No, he didn’t. He didn’t want to have to appeal to Young’s sympathy, to explain what it was like to know, down to the copper taste of the blood at the back of your throat, what it was to be prey. To know that if you didn’t help yourself, they would take every last thing from you and leave you puking up your guts in the dirt. Not because they even valued that thing, but just to show that they could.

It wasn’t as though this brain didn’t get there eventually, it just took its own sweet time. “The moment the stones were working again, they would have replaced you with Telford,” he offered, pushing the chairs under the table, clearing the path. “And Telford has almost killed everyone on board this ship _twice_ now. How long do you think the crew would last with him in charge and no one to hold him back? He’d blow up the ship and everyone on it within weeks of arriving. I couldn’t risk...”

That was true, oddly enough. Sometimes Rush didn’t know himself what drove him. Maybe part of his abhorrence for the thought of Telford and McKay in place of himself and Young really had been altruism. He was capable of it. Maybe he really had...?

“Right. Yeah. You did it for all of us. Selfless of you, Rush.”

Rush passed the table, came out into the empty space between it and the door. Young had not moved away from the wall. He was watching Rush’s progress with the thin, cold smile Rush remembered from being murdered the first time. They were going to fight. He could feel it like a charge through his blood and he wanted it, he just didn’t quite know how to make it start.

“Well, yes I suppose I’ve something of a stake in our survival but--”

“What happened to ‘no more lies?’”

Oh, oh of course it was _personal_ for Young - it was the personal betrayal that bothered him most. Everything had to be _personal_ for him.

Mysteriously, people seemed to respond to that - Young had Scott and Greer, James and TJ, Eli, lately even Varro orbiting him. Held there because they wanted his approval, wanted his love, and, when he had it, he took it for granted. That was not, not ever, going to happen to Rush. Rush was the only fully rational creature on this ship and he did not give in to anything as fucking crude, as laughably _animal_ as pack dynamics. Love and trust and all that shite. It was all fucking hormones and he would have no truck with it.

Young closed the distance between them, poked Rush in the chest with a spindly finger, leaving a jabbing little bruise. “You gave me your word, Rush.”

He’d been waiting for the trigger to be pulled and there it was. The words slammed into him like bullets, shocking him, filling him with outrage. Bullseye. Young shouldn’t have gone for that, where it was already tender. That had bloody well hurt. Fuck him anyway and his fucking self-righteousness. He deserved whatever he got.

Rush balled his fist, swung hard, his knuckles connecting solidly with Young’s jaw, snapping the man’s head back, lifting him off his feet and hurling him backwards to stagger against the wall. Wow. That was a trip and a half. That felt _good._ He’d maybe wanted to do that for a very, very long time.

Young hauled himself upright again, hands flat against Destiny’s slick metal, his lips outlined in crimson. He turned his head slightly to spit blood on the deck but did not look away from Rush’s face. It occurred to Rush that perhaps he should have pressed his advantage, he just wasn’t used to being the attacker, he didn't know how it was supposed to go.

Something shifted in Young’s expression and his stance, as though he was recalibrating. The emotion drained from behind his eyes. They’d been fighting like old enemies, like people who cared about each other’s opinions, like people who got angry with each other because they _mattered_. Now that was gone and Young was looking at him like he was a target.

This was what it felt like, was it, when Young stopped being personal? Rush... Rush didn’t actually like it very much.

He moved in, instinctively wanting to smack that expression off Young’s face, to jolt the man into acknowledging him again, into _caring_ like he damn well should.

The punch had worked like a charm, so he threw another, going for the nose this time. Before it connected Young ducked under the blow. While Rush was still struggling to pull the punch back before he broke his hand against the wall, Young grabbed him by the uniformed shoulders, and - tucking himself into a half crouch - unbalanced Rush, rolled him over his bent back and threw him to the floor.

Rush had the sense to hold his head up, so it was his shoulders and his spine that took the impact of the fall, both of which were a great deal more padded in this body than they were in his own. Only his pride was really hurt, his sense of justice. This was not fair! What about his chance to get his own back? Wasn’t he at least owed that?

Part of him, an analytical part he was glad could not be shut up even at times like this, noted that Young was now fighting like James, compensating for the loss of his strength with better technique, and it hadn’t really occurred to Rush until now that this wasn’t just the graceless brawling of streetcorner thugs. It was a skill, and Young had studied it.

He rolled to his side, had only managed to get up on hands and knees when Young was on him again - a kick to the side of the head and another to the belly. His ear burning and shrieking, scuff marks of his own bloody boot on his cheek, he managed to catch Young’s ankle on the second kick, twist it clockwise. Young had no choice but to go with it.

Young fell, but as he did he kicked out again, forcing Rush’s awkwardly angled arm to bend backwards at the elbow. The pain was excruciating. Rush let go immediately, scrambled to his feet, trying to back off, holding his arm protectively against his chest with the other hand cradling the joint.

“All right, all right,” he gasped, fucking afraid again, and that just wasn’t fair. He was going to be killed and he would lose his work that way, just because he’d tried to keep it. If those bastards at Homeworld Command hadn’t tried to take it from him in the first place he would never have had to resort to any of this. If they’d just let him alone... “You’ve made your point. Let’s... talk about this.”

“Oh now you wanna talk?” Young grabbed him by the biceps, kneed him in the groin and, as he doubled over at the sickening pain, Young drove the top of his head up under Rush’s jaw, clacking his teeth together, snapping his head back, stopping his breath. He tumbled into darkness knowing he would never find his answers, never claw his way back. So much for the quest for immortality. Step Three had not gone well at all.


	6. Chapter 6

Young stood over Rush’s unconscious form and waited to feel the bitter, hollow ache that always filled him in the aftermath of his rage, but it didn’t come. Instead, he merely felt subdued and a little shaky. The unfamiliar anger that had manifested as a buzzing along his spine and a crackle of energy across his skin had dissipated entirely. He was tired and bruised, and he could still taste blood from the cut on the inside of his cheek, but his mind was quiet.  

The fight had been a revelation. Despite his own extensive training, Young had expected the advantage to be with Rush. But Rush’s reaction time had been uncharacteristically sluggish. In fact, from Young’s perspective, Rush had almost seemed to be moving in slow motion. Young, on the hand, had never been so quick on his feet. He had had no muscle memory to rely on, but the rapidity of his thoughts had more than compensated for that handicap. He had been able to assess and to strategize on the fly, absorbing information and converting it to action so quickly that it felt more like reflex than conscious movement. It had been desperate. It had been exhilarating. It had been just a little bit like flying.

Now that it was over, Young was no longer quite sure how to feel. He only knew that he felt unlike himself. And maybe it was better not to examine his emotions too closely right now. This numbness in the wake of exertion was rather nice. In fact, he hadn’t realized quite how overactive his borrowed brain had been until this moment, when it finally took a breather.  

He stepped away from Rush, grunting softly as he put weight on his ankle. That was going to be sore for a few days, and so would his jaw where Rush had caught him with that ill-advised punch. But other than those minor hurts and a slight worsening of his headache, Young had emerged from the fight relatively unscathed.  He was certainly feeling better than Rush was going to when the bastard woke up.

Young made his way slowly to the table and pulled out a chair. It might be petty of him, but he wanted to have the height advantage for the impending conversation. He dropped into the chair with a soft sigh, threaded his fingers through his hair, and stared grimly at Rush. At Rush in _his_ body. At Rush crumpled against the wall in _his_ body. Jesus, this was a mess.

He didn’t want to think about Eli’s face as he babbled about his mother, panic and grief and anger all mingling together in his voice and turning it shrieky. He didn’t want to think of the same scenario playing out over and over again, the same heartbreak written over the faces of every member of his crew. He didn’t want to think of the collective despair that would inevitably turn to fury and hate. The last mutiny had been nothing to what Young was facing now, and as for Rush? Well, his life expectancy could probably be measured in days if the science team couldn’t undo what he had done.

“You know, you’re really fucking stupid for such a smart guy,” Young muttered. He braced his elbows on his knees and propped his chin in his hands, gazing at the still figure across from him. His hair slipped into his eyes, but he didn’t brush it away. The sensation of soft, feathery strands brushing against his face was beginning to feel almost normal.

“I wish I knew what you were thinking sometimes,” he continued in a low voice. “I can’t make sense of it. I thought we were in this together. ‘Side by side, for the benefit of everyone.’ Those were your words, Rush. Your words. And I was really starting to believe them.”  

The worst thing about all of this was how much it actually hurt. Now that his post-combat apathy was fading, Young couldn’t help focusing on all the pretty-sounding promises that Rush had so casually ground into the deck plating under his boots.  It went deeper than the anger, this sense of betrayal. It revealed how much Young had valued their fragile, fledgeling trust, and how much he had wanted it to flourish into a strong partnership. Well, he should have known better than to give into the soft, sweet lure of hope, especially where Rush was concerned. Disappointment had been inevitable.

A groan issued from the source of Young’s current problems, and he sighed. It was time for another one of their fun little chats, in which Rush would justify his actions by throwing all the blame back on Young, and Young would have to grit his teeth and count to ten and resist the urge to throttle him.

Rush groaned again and curled into himself. Still feeling that knee to the groin, no doubt. Then he twitched, drew in a sharp breath, and opened his eyes, staring directly at Young. Young returned his gaze calmly. Rush blinked rapidly, brows drawn together in a look of such profound confusion that Young almost wanted to laugh at the sight. He was sure his face had never been half so expressive throughout the entire course of his life before Rush got a hold of it.  

At first, Young attributed Rush’s apparent shock to the fact that he had lost their fight. But when something resembling wonder joined the confusion in Rush’s eyes, Young had to reevaluate that assumption. It dawned on him suddenly that Rush wasn’t surprised that Young had beaten him. He was surprised that Young hadn’t _killed_ him.  

 _Oh, for fuck’s sake_.  

If Rush still couldn’t trust Young not to fucking _murder_ him at a moment’s notice, then it wasn’t all that surprising that he didn’t trust Young in smaller matters, either. Young knew the blame for that was all on him, but _goddamnit_ , would they never get past this? Would the dust of that barren world where he had left Rush cling to them forever?  

Young stared into Rush’s eyes, thinking of alien planets and primary school bullies, and felt something give within his chest. God, but Rush looked pathetic right now. And it was so much worse this time, because Rush was wearing Young’s face, and Young hated to see that poignant mingling of pain, fear, uncertainty, and awe spread across his own features. So it was in a surprisingly gentle tone that Young finally asked, “What were you thinking, Rush?”

Rush blinked again. He struggled up into something closer to a sitting position, his back to the wall and his limbs folded awkwardly inward. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest, as if he might unravel if he let go. “I told you,” he murmured. “I couldn’t risk Telford--”

“Telford could only have taken my place if I had used the stones, genius,” Young interrupted him. He kept his tone as light and reasonable as he could manage, but some of his frustration managed to creep in. “I was planning to send a proxy to sort things out, make sure that you got a fair hearing. Anyone coming through from Earth would have had an armed guard to make sure they didn’t try to mess with the stones again. We could have handled it Rush. I _told_ you I would handle it.”

Rush’s brow knitted in confusion again. He squinted at Young as if not quite sure he was really seeing him. “Proxy?”

“Camile,” Young said. “She was going to get the IOA to back you. It might surprise you to know that she’s bristling with righteous indignation on your behalf.”

“You don’t say.” Rush sounded unconvinced.

“It’s true. Although I expect all that indignation to find a new target when she finds out about this.”

Rush winced. “I had no choice. Even if Telford hadn’t replaced you, would you have disobeyed a direct order if, for example, General O’Neill had used the stones to demand your compliance?”

Young shook his head, then absently carded his fingers through his hair. Rush’s eyes followed the motion curiously. “General O’Neill is not an unreasonable man, Rush. I doubt any of this was his idea. So yeah, I’d welcome the opportunity to talk to him about it. I’d love to hear his comments on the practice of forcibly ripping people from their own bodies over nebulous concerns about their ‘probity.’ Fuck, Rush. If that becomes a regular thing, everyone on this ship is liable to be exiled from their bodies at a moment’s notice. We’re none of us saints.”

Rush’s mouth quirked to one side in a brief acknowledgement of the truth of that statement. “So now what?” he asked softly.

“Now you undo whatever it was you did to those stones.”

Rush shook his head. “Can’t be done, I’m afraid. My program replaced the code at random. There’s no untangling it.”

“You’d better hope that’s not true,” Young said, finally allowing his voice to take on a harder edge,  “or life on this ship is going to get pretty unpleasant for you pretty damn fast.”

Rush looked like he knew it. He seemed to shrink still further into himself, and his expression went blank, as if he had turned his gaze inward. Was he remembering the taste of bile on his tongue and the dirt under his fingernails and the seemingly endless rain of blows on every exposed inch of his body? And was he already concocting some new scheme to undermine the bullies in his life?  

“Rush,” Young said softly. Rush twitched and shot him a complicated look that Young couldn’t decipher. He seemed suddenly more alert, and Young could practically see the wheels turning behind his eyes. Not a good sign. “It could already be common knowledge, you know. Eli can be discreet when necessary, but he was pretty worked up when he left. The rest of the science team know, at any rate.”  

“Yes, but it doesn’t have to go any further than that if it hasn’t already,” Rush said hastily. “It would only damage morale.”

“Which will happen anyway if the stones can’t be fixed,” Young pointed out. “And do you expect Eli and the science team to keep quiet forever about the real reason they’re broken?”

Rush apparently didn’t have an answer for that.

Young sighed and rubbed at his aching temples. “I’ll tell Eli and the others to keep this under wraps for now, if it isn’t already too late. I’d stay out of their way for a while, though, if I were you.”

“If you were me.” Rush murmured, lips curving into one of his sarcastic little smiles.  

Young felt an answering smile tug at the corners of his own mouth.  “Yeah.”

For a moment they held each other’s eyes, and Young felt like they might have reached a point of tentative understanding. They were united by this shared predicament, this fish-out-of-water experience they were both living through, and maybe they could use that to find their way back into some semblance of the alliance they had shared before.

But then abruptly, Rush’s smile morphed into a sneer. “Well, you’re not me, Colonel,” he said, somehow giving a silken texture to Young’s gravelly voice. “Don’t think that just because you wear my skin, you know anything about me. You don’t.”

Young snorted in disgusted amusement. Right. Okay. After what Rush had put him through today, he wasn’t going to let that fly. He was still angry, still hurt, still grieving over broken trust and shattered promises, and he had been so very patient up until this point.  But now he was done. “You know what?” he snapped, rising to his feet. “You’re absolutely right. I don’t know a goddamn thing about you, Rush. If I did, I wouldn’t have trusted you alone with the stones today. But I kinda thought we had this thing going where we actually _talk_ to each other before we make decisions that affect the whole crew. I guess I just wasn’t listening closely enough back when you said our ‘differences’ were behind us.”  

He ran his fingers through his hair distractedly, feeling this body’s buzzing temper come back to life.  He had to fight to keep from shaking with it.  It almost made him miss his own cold, black rages - at least _they_ could be put to good use. “But you, Rush,” he continued, working to keep his voice under control, “You don’t know me either.  If you did, this wouldn’t have happened, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

That was it, he needed to go. Young didn’t want to hear Rush’s response or find out what kind of contemptuous or recalcitrant expression he was projecting onto Young’s own face.  He just wanted out of Rush’s presence, out of this pointless conversation.  He made his way to the doorway, taking it slow but refusing to limp on his twisted ankle.  

Just before he left the room, thoughts of playground fights and desperate resolutions flickered through his mind again, making him hesitate. He stood in the doorway, torn between his desire to escape and that faint yet lingering impulse to repair the bridges that Rush had just torn down.  In his indecision, he looked back at Rush.

Rush was watching him intently, his face unreadable. Right. Well, Young hadn’t exactly been expecting contrition.

“Quick question,” he said, forcing a casual note into his tone.

Rush’s brows went up.  He lifted a hand and waved it in Young’s direction, inviting him to continue.

“When you were a kid,” Young asked, “did you own a book bag with a broken strap?”

The instantaneous transformation of Rush’s expression would have been comical if Young hadn’t had personal insight into the memories and emotions responsible for it. As it was, Rush’s stricken and deeply confused appearance was less satisfying than Young had anticipated. “Y-yes,” Rush stuttered out after a pause, and then his eyes narrowed sharply.  “Why--?”

Young shrugged.  “Just curious.”

Rush looked like he was gearing up to ask more questions, but Young was not in the mood. He offered Rush a grim, humorless smile and then left the room. He had better uses for his time right now than to waste it on his errant chief scientist.


	7. Chapter 7

What did Young mean by it, bringing that up now? Was he beginning to gain access to Rush’s memories, hardwired as they were somewhere in the neuron webwork of Rush’s brain? Well wasn’t that fantastic? Would Young pick up the kino surveillance again now too? Kinos following Rush’s every step and no privacy even inside his own mind?

Rush curled a little tighter around his pains - you’d have thought Young might have some mercy on his own balls but you’d have been wrong. Now this body felt like one solid ache from the knees to the shoulder blades. But the curious part, the worst part, was the hole that seemed to have opened just under his breastbone that funneled straight down into the abyss. Rush’s mind circled it like a penny on a slope, drawn in tighter, more hopeless spirals into the darkness and pressure and despair that could only be the frozen centre of the ninth level of hell.

This was the subterranean vault from which the anger rose up like a geyser, was it? The hollowness on the other side of that glorious rage. No wonder Young tried to be calm when he could, because his extremes were horrifying.

Well, no. Now they were Rush’s extremes to manage. He wondered if he too would start casting his mind back and coming up with Young’s memories. Some corn-fed childhood of playing football in a clapboard little mid American town, no doubt, where everyone watched John Wayne movies and checked under the bed for communists at night. Wouldn’t that be wonderful.

It took far too much effort to straighten up and get himself to his feet, but he couldn’t just sit here looking pathetic until someone found him, so he managed it anyway, eventually. His throat felt bruised - swallowing was painful. His jaw twinged at the hinge when he moved it, and all his teeth rattled. Having the headache back was almost a relief, he hardly knew himself without it, but the deep, offended throb of his balls and his stomach and his lower back? He could walk through it, slowly, and he wasn’t going to spare it any more mind than that.

The inhabited areas of Destiny felt hostile, so he got himself a screwdriver and a torch and went to ground in one of the off-limits sections where they had found a number of Ancient crates, which Young had not as yet found the man-power to open and examine. Ancient tech was notoriously volatile and dangerous, but not, to his mind, as volatile and dangerous as human beings. He breathed easier in the silence, where the scent of the air was metal and grease and chalk from the filters rather than the stench of other people’s disappointments.

Each crate here was about the size of a skip. Each had a bolted door on the inner wall, facing the back of the room. He jimmied one with the screwdriver, went inside, was hit in the face with a line of blue light that scanned him from head to toe. He froze. _Shit._ And it blinked out.

“Nicholas.” It was Gloria. The blue light lay in her hand like a model of the Earth, its cloud formations swirling. It lit a room full of shelves, the shelves stocked with parts he didn’t recognize. Something about them itched at his thoughts, but his mind was sluggish as usual so he waited for it to catch up, turned to the ship’s projection, tried not to let it show that he didn’t like her using that form, especially not when he looked like this.

“Nice to know I brought my hallucinations with me into this body.”

“Nicholas, what have you done?” A million year old sun shone on her face and her hair. She looked, as always, part amused and part reproachful. And if she was Destiny then he thought she was amazing. He was prepared to spend the rest of his life studying her, but that didn’t mean she was allowed to do the same thing to him. His inward workings were his own damn business.

“What I had to.”

Clearly this amused her. She smiled the closed lipped smile that made her look like Botticelli’s Venus. “You know, I wasn’t a genius either, but you trusted me.”

He suppressed the internal wince. She was a starship, programmed to work with a crew - of course her operating parameters would require that her crew be encouraged to work well together. If he thought of it that way, it was fine. Then he didn’t have to think of her as a person whom he had to forgive for forcing him to make the grand poetic gesture that confirmed to everyone on board that she had chosen Young. If she was a machine then she was operating admirably. If she was a person then she had some fucking nerve expecting him to be alright with that.

“Strangely enough, I trusted Gloria because she did not have a history of repeatedly abandoning and killing me. The same can’t be said of Young.”

Her smile widened to show dimples. “Yet he always brings you back.”

“Oh, and I suppose that makes it all right then, does it?” He cast his eyes up to the far corner of the crate because such stupidity merited nothing less than the full eye roll. When he looked down again, she was gone. “Very helpful. You could at least leave me a console.”

She was still listening, clearly - if monitoring his brain waves counted as such. A virtual console blinked to life in the center of the room. He used it to set a search going for this shed and its contents in the database. See if he could get some information on what all this stuff was before he tried using it.

With that in place, he lowered himself to the floor, permitted his aching body to slump over to one side, lie down, cheek against the cool metal. The hole to hell had closed over by now, but he was conscious of it nevertheless, as though its surface was ice, barely thin enough to hold his weight. He wanted to sleep and wake up when things had fixed themselves without him. Or to sleep and not to wake up at all.

God, he hated it when one of his paradigms turned out to be shaky. If you couldn’t believe in the foundations of your thought, where did that leave you?

He’d been so sure Young would kill him this time. He’d been so sure Young would kill him on the alien ship, after Eli and co had found the bridge. And he’d been wrong, twice. He’d been sure Young would kill his other self after the doppelganger had done for Telford - so sure that he had assisted with the man’s suicide. What if he had been wrong then too? What a waste of intellectual resources.

He remembered dying in Kiva’s custody - finding out later that it happened because Young had suffocated Telford in order to free him from brainwashing. Rush’s life had been merely incidental to that little drama. The conclusion had seemed inescapable - Telford mattered to Young, Rush did not.

_‘Yet he always brings you back.’_

Even that first time. It had been Young’s (borrowed) hand that freed him from the aliens, gave him the chance to find his own way home. Why would Young do that, if he had wanted rid of Rush? All he had to do was walk away and no one, not even Rush himself, would ever have known.

The wheels of his mind had been allowed to go rusty. Pushing them down this track was exhausting, and they met a resistance there, something that tasted just like anguish. But this conclusion was also inescapable: Young had brought Rush back because he wanted to.

Rush groaned, rolled over, covering his face in case something in the empty room might be watching. Tentatively, he allowed himself to approach another, related idea, this one even more dangerous. “He did it to save you,” Volker had said. Young had failed to vent the gate room, failed to kill the Lucian Alliance with one blow, put the entire ship in danger in the process, because he was trying to save Rush.

No, no, no, no, that was laughable. Young must have known that gate travel would sever the link. He would have put their lives on the line to save Telford, to save _Telford_ , who was his friend, unworthy though fucking Telford was of one millionth tiny part of such loyalty.

Yet no one other than Rush seemed aware that the link could be disrupted that way. Not even the science team had known it. Could he really believe that _Young_ did?

If he couldn’t, then the truth must be that Young had done that _for him._ Young had chosen to risk the ship, the crew, the mission, to risk and lose his unborn child, rather than sacrifice Rush.

That thought sat in the middle of the room like an adder. He scrambled up and away from it, putting his back to the wall as though an unwary move might cause it to pounce. No. No, no. Absolutely not. If he let that thought in it would fucking _break_ him. So he was not going to entertain it. He was going to...

The hand he raised to push through his hair was black with the gunk of the floor, and the side of his face felt sticky from where he had rested it against the deck plating.

No more thinking for tonight. He was going to have a shower and go to bed. Tomorrow it would become clear that he had not fundamentally misconstrued everything. He had not... actually been in a situation where he was safe and valued, only to completely undermine and destroy it by his own mistrust.

That didn’t sound at all like something he would do.

As it turned out, he had somewhat misconstrued the shower too, though this only struck him when he had thrown jacket, shirt and undershirt onto the bench and caught sight of his own shoulder and chest - stocky, broad, solid as they were. He closed his eyes. Crap.

Not showering was not tenable, however. He told himself he was fifty two years old and had never been a prude, managed to strip to the skin and get himself inside the cubicle that way. But he shut his eyes again in the warm mist, scarcely dared scrub at his dirty face, conscious of the heavy bones beneath his unfamiliar fingertips. He felt shy, unaccountably shy and jumpy around himself, as if he was trespassing, and that was ridiculous since this body was now essentially his own.

He still cut the shower short and went to bed having done little more than soak. As he hugged himself in the warm darkness (his arms too bulky, his ribs too wide for comfort) a sense of loss came flowering out of all the angles of the room, choking the inside of his chest, filling his throat with fleshy petals, making it hard to breathe.

The truth was, he liked this body. He’d always envied its power. He found its black-lashed golden eyes strikingly beautiful. There had been occasions when he had wanted to pull on the increasingly untidy curly mess of its hair just to feel the texture. But... He examined its nicely shaped hands, slid one up the opposite forearm and sighed.

But honestly? He liked it on Young. He liked the incongruous combination of this rather brutal form with Young’s new gentleness. The way Young walked in it - normally so unassuming, so undemonstrative, and yet sometimes there’d be this hitch of the hip and it would all become casually, confidently magnificent. Rush liked that maybe better than he should.

Now it was gone, and he missed it. He missed seeing Young padding about the ship like a weary lion. The fact that he could do it himself was no compensation at all.

He sighed again. The stones were still inoperative - he could not be replaced. He had not been killed for that, and even his punishment was over. He had achieved everything he set out to do and lost nothing of any moment. So why did he feel so bad?

After another two hours of lying in the dark, fruitlessly waiting for sleep to arrive, he gave up, sloped off to the mess for a cup of tea, reasonably confident that no one would be there at this ungodly hour. But he was wrong about that too.

“Dr. Rush?” said Chloe tentatively as he picked up a mug from the tray by the door. He added a pinch of the mixed leaves Becker had left in a serving bowl nearby and filled it at the spigot before edging over. She had not yet flown at him in a whirlwind of slapping and kicks, so it seemed safe enough. “Is it really you?”

“You know, I’m not sure I know the answer to that anymore,” he replied, levering himself gingerly into a chair at her table. “When the stones are active, a person’s consciousness still arises from their own body. It’s simply transferred to a new... drone, so to speak... for the duration of the proceedings. That’s why they retain all their memories, their personality and so forth. This is something quite different. Both of us are trying to be ourselves with brains that are simply not set up to do that. I don’t know what will happen in the long run - whether you will lose us both, and some new combination will arise in our absence. I...”

He smiled at her pinched look, while the FTL lights blued her face, and he knew she knew everything there was to know about losing yourself. Though maybe not the grief of watching it happen to someone else.

“You can’t have wanted this.”

“No,” he agreed, warmed as always by the undeserved trust she still placed in him. “No, I didn’t.”

“So you’re going to work out a way of fixing the stones and putting it right, right?”

He supposed she had a mother for whom she wanted to go back. He’d forgotten about that. “Honestly, Chloe,” he said, breathing in not-exactly-aniseed flavored steam, “I don’t know. I can’t see a way and I’m so tired. I’d set it right if I could, of course.” He wasn’t even completely sure that was a lie any more, but it made no difference, did it? The stones were broken beyond even his own ability to repair. He’d made sure of that. “But unfortunately I don’t think I can.”


	8. Chapter 8

Young was quite accustomed to going without sleep. Life on Destiny was dangerous and unpredictable, and marathon shifts were not as uncommon as he would have liked. But he rarely found it difficult to fall asleep once he had actually climbed into bed. Most soldiers developed the ability to fall asleep whenever and wherever they could as a simple survival tool. Rush, however, was no soldier, and he clearly did _not_ have that particular ability. It had been two days since Young had found himself stuck in Rush’s body, and aside from a few short naps, he hadn’t slept during that time. Now he was lying in bed again, staring at the ceiling and watching the shifting patterns created by the fluctuating glow of FTL travel. As he watched, his head throbbed in time with the flickering starlight.

He had ceased to think of his headache in terms of simple pain. It was a pulsing, howling _presence_ , riding around on his shoulders and piercing his skull with its long, serrated fangs. He had tried ignoring it, soothing it with self-administered neck and scalp massages, and even bargaining with it as if were a real creature that could be reasoned with. If this went on much longer, he was going to have to give it a name.

But it wasn’t just the headache keeping him awake. He had too much experience sleeping through pain for that to be the problem. No, it was his fucking _brain_. It wouldn’t stop - it wouldn’t even slow down. Images darted through his mind, a steady stream of ideas solidifying and interweaving, insights and connections lighting up one after another like street lamps at dusk. They were very much his own thoughts - his concerns, his preoccupations, his interests - but this was not the way his mind usually processed them. It was too fast, too bright, too all-consuming, and he was at the mercy of that unending flow of data.

The worst of it was, his thoughts kept sliding back to Rush. No matter how much he wanted to distract himself, his mind was determined to fixate on his biggest looming problems, all of which involved Rush. And Young really, really didn’t want to think about Rush right now. There were too many emotions tied to those thoughts, too much anger and hurt and confusion and loss. It was the sense of loss that bothered him the most. He was actually grieving as though he had been betrayed by someone he cared about. Not even Telford’s many treacheries had elicited this response from him, and yet Telford was ostensibly a friend, and Rush… well, Rush had been a tentative ally at best.

Young let out a grunt of irritation at his own train of thought and absently ran his fingers through his hair. He had begun to find this motion soothing, relishing the fine, soft texture between his fingers and the light tugging sensation along his scalp. He had abandoned the idea of cutting it all off. Somehow, that seemed like such a waste. He had always liked Rush’s hair: the way it framed his face, the way it caught the light, the way it flared and shifted when he moved. He had liked it better on _Rush_ , of course. That went without saying. He had liked everything about Rush better on Rush.

As he stroked his hair, his wrist scraped lightly against Rush’s beard.  He huffed out a soft breath, reminded again of the last time he had stopped shaving his own face. He had been in the midst of a personal crisis, aching and depressed and barely able to function. He had always had a tendency to give up on personal grooming when he gave up hope. Accordingly, the beard felt like a symbol of weakness. It felt like failure, and he was tired of carrying around that personal reminder. He just wanted to be rid of it.

Fuck it. This was his body, wasn’t it? Rush had seen to that. The hair could stay, but the beard had to go.

Decided on this course of action and glad to have something to do besides _think_ , Young pushed himself out of bed. He flicked on the lights, located his electric razor, and made his way to his shaving mirror. As he shaved, Young took his time to accommodate for his new, unfamiliar bone structure. It was a bit of an adjustment, but he knew he’d get used to it eventually… along with everything else he needed to get used to.

A few minutes later, Rush’s cleanshaven face stared back at him in the mirror. Young blinked a few times, taken aback by how much sharper Rush’s features looked without any scruff. Even on Icarus base, he couldn’t remember ever seeing Rush without at least a few day’s growth of stubble. But now it was gone, and there was something quite hawkish and predatory about his face that Young had never noticed before. Hmm. That would be an adjustment, too.

Young set aside the razor and turned off the lights. He toppled back into bed, pulled up the covers, and let out a deep sigh. He felt slightly more at ease now that he had done something to claim this body for his own. Unfortunately, his head still pounded as if someone was hammering nails into it, and his brain still didn’t show any signs succumbing to sleep. So he lay awake as the hours crept by, watching the play of ghostly lights upon his ceiling and trying to think about anything but Rush.

 

* * *

 

TJ was pretty sure that her early motives for studying medicine had been noble. Caretaking, saving lives, that sort of thing. All very high-minded and optimistic stuff. She doubted that any of her original reasons had involved having an excuse to secrete herself away in the infirmary and avoid drama unfolding elsewhere. But at this moment, that was the aspect of her calling that she was most grateful for. Here, in her orderly little kingdom, she could be alone. She could do her work in relative peace, comfortable in the knowledge that it was not her job to offer empty reassurances to her anxious shipmates or monitor for signs of dangerous unrest. That was for Scott, James, and Greer to worry about. Instead, she was going to spend her morning continuing her study of Destiny’s medical archives. That was a much better use of her time than worrying about problems she had no power to solve.

Not that she was worried, per se. So her commander and erstwhile lover had exchanged bodies with a man of dubious integrity and pronounced Machiavellian tendencies with whom he shared an extremely rocky history. Well, that was slightly disconcerting. But bad blood aside, it was common enough to see people wandering around Destiny in bodies that didn’t belong to them, so why should this be any different? And yes, Telford had staged another attempted power grab and McKay, that self-important ass, had apparently broken the communication stones. That was… Okay, it was potentially really bad, but the science team was on the job and she had great faith in their collective ability to work eleventh hour miracles. It was all going to be okay. She wasn’t worried. Not really.

TJ gave a sigh of annoyance. She had just read the same paragraph on her laptop three times in a row, and she still didn’t know what it said. She hadn’t been able to concentrate all morning.

Okay, maybe she was a little worried.

It wasn’t so much that the communication stones were broken. That was a potentially dire situation if it couldn’t be fixed, but the science team would find a way. They always did. No, it was Rush and Colonel Young’s situation that really bothered her, and she couldn’t even quite put her finger on why, exactly. She just knew that something was wrong. Something beyond the obvious. The Colonel was exhibiting a certain air of defeat that was a little too familiar, and yet there was also a new intensity about his speech and movements that was somewhat disquieting. She didn’t know what to make of it, but the combination didn’t seem to bode well for his mental health.

As for Rush, she hadn’t seen him since the incident occurred. At first she had assumed that he was devoting all his time to fixing the stones - getting completely absorbed in a project and forgetting little things like food and sleep was not exactly new behavior for Rush - but an overheard comment from Dr. Volker revealed that the rest of the science team hadn’t seen much of Rush lately either. So what was he up to? Did the Colonel know? Was that why he seemed so troubled? And did it have anything to do with the fact that she had noticed a bit of bruising beneath the scruff on Young’s jaw yesterday?

She sighed again and rubbed at her eyes as if her distraction was just a matter of blurred vision. “None of this is helpful,” she muttered to herself.

“What isn’t helpful?” came a soft voice from the open doorway.

TJ let her hands drop into her lap and turned to find Colonel Young leaning against the doorframe.  He offered her a small smile, but there was something pained about the tightness of the lines around his eyes.

“Nothing,” she replied, rising to her feet and returning his smile with as much warmth as she could muster. “I was just talking to myself.”

He pushed away from doorframe and walked toward the instrument table that she had repurposed as a desk. She watched him approach, noting his straight posture and deliberate, unhurried steps. That was all Young, and it was reassuring to see. But the impression of energy trapped below the surface - the suggestion of something caged - was new. Or if not new, it wasn’t usually detectable unless he was feeling either particularly angry or particularly… amorous.  

As he drew closer, she noticed that he had shaved. And yes, that was definitely a fading bruise on his jaw. Something _had_ happened between him and Rush, then. It figured.

The question was, how had Rush weathered the encounter? Was he sporting any interesting bruises? Was he hiding out somewhere, licking his wounds, and was that why no one had seen him? It was possible that Rush had been the victor, of course, given that he was in Young’s body. However, TJ rather doubted it. She had seen the Colonel take down larger, stronger opponents before, and he knew his own body’s weaknesses better than anyone. No, she suspected that Rush had gotten the worst of it.

“Something wrong?” Young asked, a note of concern creeping into his voice. He studied her through Rush’s dark, hooded eyes, giving them a softness that she had never seen before. There were hints of affection in that gaze, awkward and imperfectly masked. It was uncomfortable, but it was also achingly sweet.

“No,” she assured him. “Nothing’s wrong, exactly. I’m just…” She paused, running her eyes over him again. Now that they were separated only by the width of her desk, the signs of his discomfort and exhaustion were more evident. “How are you?” she asked.

He lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck, and she recognized it as one of Rush’s habitual motions. “I think there’s something wrong with me,” he confessed quietly. “I think the stones might have done more than just switch my consciousness with Rush’s. My head… it feels like there’s an electrical storm going on up there.”

“Headache?” TJ asked sympathetically. She had wondered about that.

“Yeah,” Young said. “Not the worst I’ve ever had, but definitely the most relentless. It’s been two and a half days, and it’s not showing any signs of letting up.” He looked almost apologetic, as if he had just admitted to something shameful. “But it’s not just that,” he continued.“It’s… my mind feels overstimulated. Or possibly under-stimulated, I don’t really know. I can’t slow down my thoughts; they just take over and cycle around and around.” He made a revolving motion with one raised finger. “I can’t shut my brain up or slow it down. I can’t sleep. Feels like a never ending caffeine high.”

Never ending caffeine high. Hmm. Although Rush’s outward presentation was usually calm and collected, that still seemed like a pretty fair description of his baseline mental state. The scientist had an uncanny alertness about him, and his mind always seemed to be actively engaged in solving some problem or developing some scheme. And now Colonel Young had inherited that overactive brain, and he was feeling understandably overwhelmed by it.

“Okay,” TJ replied thoughtfully. “I think you’re talking about two unrelated problems.”

Young lifted his brows. His vaguely hopeful expression looked out of place on Rush’s face, but it was rather endearing.

“First,” TJ began, “I don’t think the headache has anything to do with the stones. I’ve always suspected that Rush had chronic headaches, and it’s really not surprising.  He works all the time and rarely sleeps. He has terrible posture and spends hours hunched over consoles, so his spine is probably in bad shape at this point. And he almost never wears his glasses anymore. Any one of those factors could cause headaches. Taken together--”

“Nightmare scenario, got it,” Young murmured. “His eyesight is definitely worse than mine.”

“You should probably borrow his glasses if you’re going to be doing any paperwork,” TJ advised.  “And for the pain…” She walked over to her little pharmacy and took down a small jar filled with fine gray-green dust. “Mix a pinch of this with some water. You can take it every four hours.” She returned to her desk and held out the jar to him.

He accepted it with evident reluctance and turned it over a few times in his hands. Then he lifted his eyes, staring at her reproachfully from under his brows. It was such a classic Young expression that she couldn’t suppress her answering grin. “TJ,” he said slowly, “Is this what I think it is?”

“If you’re thinking it’s that new medicinal--” she began.

“The one the science team has been getting high on several times a week--”

“They’re calling it ‘clinical trials,’ I think.”

Young snorted and looked down at the jar in his hand. “Tempting as it is, I can’t afford to compromise my thought process right now. Or ever, really.”

She wondered if he had thought about that back when he was drinking himself to sleep every night, but she wisely didn’t bring it up. “It won’t get you high at the dose I mentioned,” she promised. “It will relax the tense muscles in your neck and shoulders and take the edge off your headache. It might even help you sleep. You can double the dose at bedtime if you need to.”

The Colonel unscrewed the lid from the jar and sniffed its contents. He tilted his head, shrugged, and replaced the lid. “Okay, I’ll give it a try. What about the, um… other problem?”

“Right,” murmured TJ.  She shifted uncomfortably. “That… also probably has nothing to do with the stones.”

“You mean this… having his brain in overdrive all the time, that’s normal for Rush too?” he asked, and he actually looked more amused than upset. “Well, that at least explains a few things about him.”

No kidding. “Scott told me that you and Rush aren’t connected by the stones anymore.  That for all intents and purposes, this is your body now.” She gestured toward him.

He sobered immediately, as if her words had brought to mind a particularly unpleasant memory. Oh yes, there was definitely more going on here behind the scenes than anyone had let on. TJ wondered just how concerned she ought to be. Judging by the Colonel’s grim expression, very.

“That’s correct,” was Young’s only comment. He glanced down at the cylindrical jar in his hand and began to roll it slowly between his palms. He was fidgeting, albeit in a very controlled manner. Still, it was the most un-Young-like thing she had seen him do so far, and she didn’t like it.

“So your consciousness is fully integrated with his brain at the moment. Honestly, Colonel, with totally unfamiliar brain chemistry to contend with, it’s amazing that you’re doing as well as you are. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just going to be a really rough learning curve, I think.”

She tore her eyes away from his hands to take in his face. With his eyes cast down and his head tilted forward, he looked more defeated than ever. Some protective instinct flared inside her, and she reached out to lay a hand on his arm. He froze, then shot a questioning look from behind a few stray locks of hair.  

“Just distract yourself. Give your mind something to do,” she suggested, injecting an encouraging note into her voice which was only slightly forced. She glanced quickly around the room for inspiration, then spotted the laptop on the desk. “Why don’t you try reading something? The Ancient database is full of interesting information. Not just about science and medicine, but all kinds of things. History, literature, politics, military tactics. I’m sure you can find something…” she trailed off, noting the way his eyes had sharpened at her suggestion.

He peered at her intently, then looked down at the laptop. And _oh god_ , it was as if Rush’s consciousness had stepped right back into his body in that moment. He had suddenly acquired that hungry, calculating look that she had come to associate with Rush but which she had never expected from Young.“Yes,” he murmured, “of course. I’m him. I might as well make the most of it.”

TJ slowly withdrew her hand from his arm. “I suppose so,” she said cautiously. “What are you planning to do?”

Young laughed softly and lifted his eyes. Just like that, he was himself again. The straight posture, gentle smile, and understated air of anticipation all clearly belonged to Colonel Young in one of his happier moods. “I’m going to do some reading,” he said. “Thanks for your help, TJ.”  

“You’re welcome,” she said, somewhat relieved.  He nodded and turned to go, but she called after him, “How’s Rush?”

That took the spring out of his step at once. He turned slowly back toward her, his expression carefully neutral. “I haven’t seen him in two days,” he said evenly. Neither his tone nor his face gave anything away, but she knew him. She could knew what it meant when his shoulders went rigid, and she could see the way he was gripping that little jar of medicinal powder tightly enough to turn his knuckles white.

“I’m guessing that’s when he tagged you on the jaw, then,” she said, tapping at her own jaw line.  

He blinked a few times, then smiled humorlessly. “It was the only solid hit he got in.”

“I figured,” she said. “So how is he? Breathing, I assume. How about walking? I haven’t seen him around.”

“Everything should be in working order,” he assured her, and a hint of amusement crept into his voice.

She nodded, marginally reassured. “What did he do this time?”

He rubbed at his eyes, and that blanket of weary disillusionment seemed to envelope him again. “Something really, really stupid,” he growled, “and appallingly selfish. But mostly just stupid.” He let his hand drop and heaved a sigh. “But I understand why he did it.”

“That… sounds like a step in the right direction, at least,” TJ said, trying to be optimistic and not to think too hard about what sort of stupid and appallingly selfish thing Rush could have done.

Young shook his head. “Nope, I don’t think so. We’re never going to get anywhere until he understands a few things about _me_. And that,” he said with a grim little smile, “is _never_ going to happen.”

And with that, he turned on his heel and walked out of the infirmary, apparently deciding that their conversation was over.

TJ stared after him for a few moments, then dropped into her chair with a little groan. Her strategy had clearly been flawed; the infirmary was just as likely to attract drama as anywhere else on this ship, if not more so. Now she had a whole new set of problems to worry about, and that grieved look in the Colonel’s eyes was going to haunt her for the rest of the day


	9. Chapter 9

The ship was reassuringly quiet as Young made his way to the shower room with a bundle of clothes tucked under his arm. Most of the crew was asleep, which was just as well. Taking a shower was going to be awkward enough without a potential audience. The design of the shower stalls on Destiny really didn’t do much to promote privacy. And no, Young had never been self-conscious about his own nudity before - the military trained that out of you pretty quick - but it was different in Rush’s body. He hadn’t even taken a thorough look at _himself_ yet. He certainly didn’t want to give anyone else an eyeful.

At least he didn’t have to do this with his head pounding and his shoulders aching. He had taken his first dose of TJ’s medicinal powder a few hours ago, and now he was almost pain-free. There was just that hint of a languid, floating sensation that he imagined could be _very_ pleasurable at a higher dose, but he was sticking to his one pinch every four hours, thank you very much. He’d leave the ‘clinical trials’ to the science team.

Young unfolded the spare SGC uniform he had uncovered in the supply room - it had previously belonged to Corporal Gorman, and looked like it would fit Rush’s small figure fairly well - and hung it over the glass partition of the shower stall. Then came the first of the awkward steps to getting clean: undressing. Young swallowed and stared down at himself, trying to figure out where to start. He decided to take off Rush’s boots first out of sheer cowardice. But once his socks had also been discarded, he had to man up and get serious about this. He hastily slipped out of Rush’s vest and then pulled both t-shirts over his head all at once.

And that was where things started to go downhill. Because Rush’s chest was nearly hairless, which he found he liked, and Rush’s flat stomach was really quite nice. Young pressed his hand to his abdomen and traced the outline of lean muscles under soft skin. Rush was skinny, but he was stronger than he looked. Young had known that for quite a while. But it was a different thing to be able to feel the evidence with his own - okay, with Rush’s - fingertips.

But he was letting himself get sidetracked. Flushing slightly, he unbuckled Rush’s belt and shoved down his jeans and underwear without delay or ceremony. He then kicked Rush’s clothes off to one side and stepped into the shower, promising himself that he would not get distracted again.

The warm mist felt as delicious against his bare skin as always, and that was comforting. Not that he had really expected bathing to be all that different in Rush’s body than in his own. Except for the whole minefield of being naked while inhabiting a body he was perversely attracted to, of course, which he was _not_ thinking about.

While continuing to _not_ think about that, he began to massage the mist into his skin, starting with his scalp and working his way down. This strategy worked great until he got to a certain point, and then he paused, staring helplessly down at himself. Because there was Rush’s cock, soft and uncut and nestled amidst curling brown hair, and it looked so very tempting. Young’s fingers itched to touch and explore and experiment. If only he weren’t hampered by this inconvenient twinge of guilt.

And why should he feel guilty, after all? It was mostly Rush’s fault that he was in this situation. Rush had broken the stones. Rush had either delayed or destroyed their ability to return to their own bodies. Rush had betrayed him. So was Young supposed to abstain from any kind of sexual release forever, out of _politeness_? It seemed absurd, viewed in that light. Rush really had no right to fault him for _anything_ he chose to do with this body.

Tentatively, Young reached down to take Rush’s cock in hand. It was already beginning to stir, responding to his growing excitement. He used his thumb to nudge back the foreskin and swipe over the head, and he drew in a quick breath at the sensation. Wow, okay. Sensitive. Young blinked a few times, feeling his pulse speed up. He adjusted his grip on his hardening cock and tried a few quick strokes. He winced. Too rough. Rush required a slightly gentler touch, apparently. He tried again, and this time… oh yes, that was perfect. That rhythm was divine, and if he gripped himself just so…

Young groaned softly and leaned his back against the glass. He arched his back and gave himself up to pleasure, abandoning any notion of maintaining boundaries between himself and this borrowed body. He was so sick of denying himself in one way or another. He was going to take this, and he was going to draw every last ounce of enjoyment from it.

Rush’s erect cock was long and slender and pretty, just as Young would have predicted. It was almost elegant, if something so carnal could be described in such a way. He loved the feel of it in his… well, in _Rush’s_ hand. That set him off thinking what it would actually feel like in his own larger, stronger hand, but no, it was better not to think about that right now. This was weird enough already.

He increased the speed of his strokes, but it still wasn’t quite enough. He began to move his hips instead, thrusting up into his fist. Yes. Oh _fuck_. That was brilliant. The little noises that escaped him made him feel even more desperate, because that was Rush’s voice and he had never heard Rush sound so vulnerable or needy. Those gasps and whimpers were exquisite. And he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about Rush, _he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about Rush_ , but his mind went there anyway and _god_ , the images in his head would terrify him if he wasn’t so damn turned on. Images of Rush writhing under his hands and crying out with pleasure. Rush sprawled out, open and inviting. Rush trusting Young, for once in his damn life, to do something other than hurt him. And Young wouldn’t disappoint. Young would give him more bliss than he knew what to do with. Young would…

Young sucked in a sharp breath and threw back his head, vibrating with his release. Then he sagged back against the glass partition. There were spots floating before his eyes and a buzzing in his head and a tingling energy all over his body. He focused on these physical sensations rather than on any of the forbidden fantasies that had just intruded upon his climax. He was going to shove those firmly back into the dark recesses of his mind where they usually lived, exiled and unacknowledged. Because while his attraction to Rush wasn’t anything new, present circumstances made it even more inconvenient than usual.

He just hoped that the stones could be fixed and things could revert back to normal soon. In the meantime, he’d take TJ’s advice and start a new course of study. Maybe that would have a dampening effect on his libido.

 

* * *

 

Rush leaned back against the headboard of his bed and acknowledged the utility of keeping out of the way for a while. In fact it was no hardship to concentrate on his own interests rather than face the tedium of administration and all the little stressors that came from other people’s unreasonableness. He had gladly sorted through the devices in his newly opened shed and concluded that they all belonged to one larger machine – that they slotted together somehow to produce one unified effect.

He had his suspicions about what he was building, but he reserved final judgment until he had it complete. In the mean time, assembling a ridiculously complicated alien device out of its constituent parts with no blueprint but for a vague feeling of what fitted where... it was an absorbing challenge that he was happy to have the time to work on.

He massaged his temples with his fingers, trying to stave off the inevitable return of his headache. His right hand throbbed from where he had lost his temper with himself this morning and slammed it against the wall. While he had to give it to this brain that it did in fact get there eventually, working with it was like being a salmon trying to swim up a waterfall. The fucking effort involved, he’d had no idea. The waste of time. The frustration. He could not stay like this.

And he was so fucking tired. He was tired like the marrow of his bones had been replaced with dust and the flesh on him was lead. He was tired like the air was sump oil and it was labor to breathe. He opened his eyes in the mornings and thought _no, God, not again._ He couldn’t understand where this was coming from, because as far as he knew this body was fit and healthy, younger than his own, and ought to be spilling over with vitality. He should not be so drained.

But he was, and potential lynchings aside he refused to be driven out of his own quarters by any threat, so although he kept off the crew’s radar willingly enough while he was working, he returned often to his room to sleep. They only had to come by frequently if they really wanted to find him. For a beating, or whatever.

None had done so, so far. Three days in, he was beginning to relax his vigilance a little, dare to entertain the possibility that none would. So the knock on the door as he was lying down to rest was unwelcome. His heart rate kicked up a little, but not much. It was too heavy for fear.

He opened the door.

“Rush.”

“Young.”

Of course it was Young. He didn’t wish to speak to Young or think of him, so of course he was to be forced to do both.

The man looked like he’d made himself very at home in Rush’s body. He’d found a uniform approximately his own size. Judging from the darker splotches around the collar, it had probably once been Gorman’s. He was clean shaven, with his hair tied back in a twist of broken bootlace. _What made you think you could shave without my permission?_ Rush thought, rousing from his state of squashed apathy for a moment of blessed irritation.

The hair was damp too. Young had showered, in his body, and wasn’t it an absolute certainty that he had not been as circumspect about it as Rush had? Young was a bull in a china shop where finer feelings were concerned. Even if he thought them pretty he wouldn’t be able to prevent himself from trampling them, and the chances were he wouldn’t give them that much thought. He would hit them because he loved to hear them smash.

 _Well, I hope you liked what you saw._ Rush’s mouth quirked up. A sliver of amused glee uncoiled in the pit of his stomach unexpectedly, lightening the weight on his back, _because you’re stuck with it._

Young raised his eyebrows at the smile, and yes, perhaps they had stood watching each other for a little too long, but it was still remarkable to see each other like this. It was still worth looking.

Rush stepped back and gestured him to come in. “What can I do for you?”

Young’s skeptical smile was so much an echo of his own that it gave him deja vu. He took it to mean ‘ _now_ you ask,’ and it was reassuring to know that life went on. Some things were constant, and Young’s disapproval was one of them.

“Tell me you have the stones fixed?” Young walked in, moving more like himself now. He sat down on Rush’s bed as though he owned it, and obviously part of him did. They were bleeding together at the edges, Rush and he, becoming one flesh - a marriage with none of the fun.

And _that_ wasn’t a track Rush intended to follow any further into the wild, particularly when it did not fill him with quite the degree of horror he had been hoping for. Disengage, and fast.

“I think I told you already, Colonel, that isn’t possible.” He held up a hand to forestall Young’s anger.

“Instead I’ve been working on another of our other long term problems.”

“Which is?”

That had put the chill back in the conversation all right. Just as well. “I’ve discovered a device I think may be a precursor of the Goa’uld sarcophagus. It’s in pieces at the moment but I think I can make it operational before long.”

Young shook his head. “Those things make you psychotic.”

Which was almost identical to his response to the chair - rule it out because of the obvious dangers without even thinking about the potential benefits. The man was such a coward.

“I’d have thought you’d have been willing to take that risk if it meant a cure for Doctor Park. And Lieutenant Johansen, of course.”

Young stiffened into immobility, even his unconscious movements stilling. _Got you_ , Rush thought, with something of an internal smile. _See. I can offer you good things. I’m well worth keeping around. Just don’t ask me to work on a way to get myself replaced, because I’m not doing that. I’m not._

Young’s deep sigh didn’t have quite the same sepulchral ring it had in his own voice. He folded his hands in his lap and leaned forward. “TJ’s condition, and Lisa’s... they’re not urgent right now like the stones are.”

Now Rush was amused again. “I never thought I’d see the day. You’re putting mission priorities ahead of individuals? It seems my body’s doing you some good.”

“Rush.” Young stepped on the banter as if it was a snake, impatient, all business. Oh, and they had reverted to this, had they? This was not a man who was ever likely again to offer to play chess, or attempt awkward small talk early in the morning on the first bridge shift of the day. It gave Rush a pang that he despised in himself. One little misdemeanor and suddenly he was being treated like a criminal again? He tightened his lips to prevent them from curving down, as a great sullen swell of resentment replaced his awareness of loss. He lifted his chin and looked Young in his eyes. They were dark as black coffee, but many degrees colder.

“Maybe ordering you to repair the stones is never going to work, because you’d just break whatever the science team is doing anyway. But I _am_ ordering you to at least work on getting us two detangled, because you can’t want this any more than I do. Maybe there your own damn self interest will keep you in line.”

This had always been the problem between the two of them. What on Destiny made Young think that he had the right to tell Rush what to do? Young seemed to imagine that just because he was in charge of his thugs he was therefore in charge of everything else, but Rush had worked all his life to be out of that system, and he did not ever intend to be subject to it again.

“Oh by all means. I’ll make every science decision contingent on your orders in future, shall I? ‘Oh deary me, it’s going to blow up. Never mind, Young said to do it so we’ll do it anyway, damn the torpedoes--’”

“What the hell is your problem?” Young stood up, stepped in close. Time paused in a moment when they were both aware another fight was just a heartbeat away, just the width of their skin. Rush’s borrowed heart beat fast and strong as his body came alive around him.

Then Young backed off, shaking his head. “I’m the only thing standing between you and a lynch mob right now Rush. How about you start working on that just to humor me, okay?”

Rush’s ‘problem,’ if anyone could call it that, was that he did not react well to threats. He had been beaten, and robbed most of his life, but he had never let the bully win. He was not about to start now. Nevertheless he also did not have time or energy for another brawl right now, and one of the two of them needed to act like a reasonable man. He let out the breath he had been holding, turned slightly aside. “Whatever you say.”

Young eyed him suspiciously, wrong-footed by the apparent concession, but toned his aggressiveness down a notch. Rubbing the back of his neck, breathing slow and deliberately, he regarded the floor as if he was inspecting an underling’s bunk for dust. Rush was just about to suggest that he might like to bugger off when Young raised his head again and took a pair of glasses out of his top pocket.

“I didn’t actually come here to fight.”

“Well, I know you’ve a lot of experience in doing things you never intended to do.” Rush twisted the knife because he could, but Young didn’t rise to the bait. His smooth, closed off, closed down expression didn’t give Rush the satisfaction it should. Why was everything so fucking complicated with this man, when Rush’s analysis of the situation still said it was simple?

“I came to offer a swap.” He tipped the glasses in Rush’s direction. “I guess these fit you now. I was hoping you’d let me use yours.”

Rush took them delicately, anxiety worming a tendril through the briar patch of his anger. He hadn’t expected this. What did it mean? Neanderthals like Young hardly needed glasses - he surely didn’t read for pleasure. So... was it some kind of overture? One of those bizarre social things that people did that he had often meant to read some anthropology to try to understand, only there were always more important things to do with his time. Those things that people expected you to know, without ever telling you how they worked or what they signified.

Yet there seemed no harm in it. He fetched his own spectacles from the nightstand and passed them over. Possibly he was overreacting and the man did have paperwork and administrative drudgery of that sort to attend to after all. “You’re behind on your reports?”

Young looked him over as if he had read all of Rush’s unflattering thoughts on his face. But he just took the glasses and sighed. “Something like that.”

After he left, Rush tried to turn to mathematics for comfort, sweeping clear the wall by his bed and selecting a perfect new piece of chalk in a pre-maths ritual that should have left him feeling calmed, clear, and brimming over with a kind of disciplined anticipation. What mystery of the deep foundations of the universe should he model today? What principle should he examine and turn over and discover the rightness and the beauty thereof? The streaks of starry phosphorescence that curled from Destiny’s prow, for example, what made them? What determined their shape? the same structure that underlay the curve of the petals of a rose? Of a seashell? It seemed a good place to start.

He worked for half an hour, not without results, but without satisfaction. At the end of it, with little more than a single line of equations, he threw the chalk down and flung himself disconsolately on his bed. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get there - he knew he could - but the fun had gone out of it. Admittedly the first half an hour, if it wasn’t a blessed relief to thoughts that had been pent up too long and were trying to explode his skull from the inside, could sometimes be an exercise in getting traction. But he should have been able to feel himself engage with the problem by now - should have felt the solid coupling to a train of ideas, and the driving excitement to see where it lead.

And he didn’t. It was hard work and he was tired. Maybe he should sleep and hope that tomorrow when he woke this grinding fatigue might have finally lifted - hope that he hadn’t sacrificed the very thing that gave his life meaning in his attempt to keep it.

Fucking Young and his fucking brain. He might have known it would be substandard. He might have known he couldn’t endure life as one of the enemy, a man who represented everything animal in life that Rush had transcended and left behind.

Maybe it was that thought that followed him into sleep and gave him uneasy dreams as he curled around the slow ache of his hand and faced the thought that he might be doomed to stay like this for good.

 

* * *

 

_His dreams are incoherent. Little snatches of the past like photos pinned to a stranger’s album, remembered voices like a radio on in another room, pictures without sound. He’s little and the classroom is packed, and the kid behind him keeps peppering his back with spitballs, and he wants to turn around and smack the guy one, but he doesn’t. He just keeps looking at the triangle on the board and trying to figure out how the teacher got to where she got to from the things she told them, because he can’t make it work out at all._

_“Everyone understand that?”_

_There’s nodding all around, and he feels kind of sick because he’s the only one who hasn’t got it, and that must mean he’s the stupidest guy in the school, but he puts his hand up anyway because he wants to know. “Can you... can you go through it again?”_

_She shares a smug little smile with the kids at the front, and maybe she thinks he doesn’t know that’s part pity and part contempt, but he’d have to be dumb as a rock to miss that. “Everett, maybe you should try to pay attention more. Now for the benefit of those of you who are not slow, we’ll move on to the next question.”_

_He spends the next quarter of an hour in a fume of shame and rage, feeling every laugh and sidelong glance like a nettle sting. So he decides he’ll show her, and at recess he goes to the library and looks it up, figures it out on his own there in the quiet. It’s not that hard really, she just explained it badly. He feels a little better knowing he’s prepared if anyone ever asks that question again, though of course they never do._

_~_

_It’s a new school. It’s smaller and grubbier than the old. After the divorce, his mother works too hard and now there’s not enough money to live in the good part of town. He’d finally got to grips with the old school, knew all the cliques and the gangs, who to avoid, who to knock down on sight and who to share his lunch with. The teachers had almost begun to stop being surprised when he passed his tests. Now he realizes he should have known a new school meant all of that to learn again. He should have prepared before he even arrived. He keeps his mouth shut for the first four weeks, observing, and that’s what people remember of him for the next four years._

_He’s too much of a nerd for the stupid kids and the smart ones laugh in his face. Everyone seems to want him to get into football, but he can’t see the point._

_~_

_“Sweetheart,” says his mother, gray curls squashed under a spotted headscarf that he doesn’t like because it makes her look old. “Why don’t you go out?”_

_And it is beautiful outside. Fall on the cusp of evening and the air is cool. The moon and the sun are in the sky together and he can guess where Cassiopaea and Ursa Minor will be once the tawny desert gold of sunset wears into black. A lot down there’s an abandoned gas station where the kids pick blackberries and the girls smack their purple lips with wicked relish when they see him watching, and that’s... all different kinds of sweet._

_But he shakes his head over it regretfully, because if he doesn’t make this study plan and complete the card index of books he has to read and annotate for his finals he’s not going to get through and that doesn’t bear thinking about._

_“You know, if your heart is set on the military, the army would take you without all of this…” she waves a calloused hand at his textbooks. “All this. I just worry that you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, trying to do something you’re not…”_

_“I don’t want to be in the army, mom. I want to be a pilot. They don’t let you in without good grades.”_

_“It’s very hard to be a pilot, sweetheart. What if you’re just not…”_

Not good enough _is what she wants to say. He knows that because he’s not stupid. It’s not what you want to hear from your own mother but hey, no point in getting upset, right? It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks as long as he finally arrives where he wants to go. He’s prepared to knuckle down and work hard and keep proving himself for as long as it takes._

_~_

_He’s in a grey field that stretches out to the horizon on every side, and he’s swallowing stones. They aren’t large stones - they fit in the cup of the palm of his hand. They taste of dirt. After a while, the first ten or so, it doesn’t hurt any more, but the weight of them inside is… it’s not unbearable, yet, but he knows it’s going to be. Soon the mass of them will be more than he can contain and it will tear through, and then he’ll fall. He’ll fall forever because this abyss has no end to it. You can always slide further down._

_~_

_“You’re not the man for the job Colonel. Everyone can see it.”_

 

* * *

 

Rush awoke tireder than ever. Scratching meditatively at his stubble, he stared up at the ceiling, unwilling to pick again at his paradigms in fear that they would all unravel like a safety net and he would fall through. After profound reflection, one thing was clear enough. At present, he utterly despised his life. He had probably better get up and get on with some work.


	10. Chapter 10

“So…” Eli clutched the notebook to himself as he paused inside the Colonel’s open doorway, announcing himself with a word that was at least half a sigh.

Young looked up with a smile, and although it had been creepy at first to see Young’s expressions on Rush’s face, it was even creepier to realize with a jerk that he was starting to get used to it. It hadn’t been more than a week since the whole thing with Telford and McKay, but time on Destiny moved at its own sweet pace and he was beginning to feel like it was forever since he’d seen Young looking like... well, he guessed he shouldn’t say ‘like himself.’ Not after this news at least.

“Eli.” Young tilted his head as he looked Eli up and down, then he ducked it with a wry expression. “It’s bad news?”

Eli bit his lip and sidled forward. “Well,” he laughed a kind of laugh that even he could tell meant _don’t hurt me, this is not my fault_ , “There’s good news and there’s bad.”

Young’s smile turned sympathetic. “That’s fifty percent better than we normally do on this ship.”

He gestured Eli to have a seat, so Eli perched on the edge of the coffee table (if you could call it a coffee table. Did the Ancients even drink coffee? He would have to look that one up.)

“Let’s have it then.”

“Good or bad first?”

“Pick one.”

That was a bummer. Eli’d been trying to work out which one to lead with all the way here. Brace them up with the nice stuff before you go in with the bad? Keep the good to soothe them with once they’d heard the worst? That was hard.

“Well,” he decided on logic, or causality or one of those things. Young wasn’t the kind of person to overreact either way until he’d heard everything, so it probably made no difference. “Well, we’ve found a backup of the stones’ operating code in the database.”

“Mm-hmn,” Young put his pen down and folded his hands on the desktop in front of him. He looked very neat in his black clothes, with his hair tied back like that. Eli wondered if he would buzz-cut it after this announcement and felt kind of sad at the thought. What was Rush doing now in his borrowed body? Was he growing a beard? He couldn’t hide forever and then they’d find out, and that would be kind of sad too.

Eli was going to miss them both, even though they were right here.

“Which, by the way, was really, really lucky. I mean the size of that database is huge like you wouldn’t believe and the Ancient search terms are... their minds didn’t work exactly like ours and that’s normally not a problem, but when you’re trying to find something, figuring out what to ask for is half the battle.”

“Eli…” A patient look.

 _Oh,_ he thought, refocusing on the subject. “So anyway. What this means is that we can get the stones working again.”

He’d had his moment of desperate joy over that before he came. It still brought echoes of weepy, wobbly relief, but now there was a new anxiety to accompany it, a new grief. They kept being forced to pay unbearable prices for every victory out here, and this one felt like too much to ask.

“But…” said Young gently, and maybe he’d already guessed, or maybe he was just reacting to the strain in Eli’s voice.

“Basically it’s a clean copy of the code. If we replace what’s on the stones with this new copy they’ll work again as if this incident had never happened, but…”

He couldn’t say it. He had to see his mom again before she did something stupid, but...  
“We’ll be stuck like this?”

Eli was grateful not to have to get the words out. He nodded. “Yeah. Because if there was a way of reversing it, it would have been in the imprints left on the stones from when you both used them. We restore them to factory defaults and they should work again fine, but that information will be lost. There really will be no way back, after that.”

 

* * *

 

Eli’s distress was palpable. So many conflicting emotions flickered across his face that it was questionable whether even _he_ knew which he felt most keenly. It was unpleasant to watch. Young let his eyes drop, slumping under a wave of weariness that forcibly reminded him of how it felt to be in his own body.

Well. That was that, then.

It wasn’t even much of a surprise. Even on their good days, there was only so much luck to go around on Destiny. The worst disaster - a future without the communication stones - could be averted. That was the important thing. The rest… well, he could live with it. He supposed he had no choice.

He glanced down at himself, taking in his slender torso and sinewy limbs wrapped in a uniform just slightly too big for him. He lifted his hands, turned them over, wiggled the long, graceful fingers. It struck him suddenly that Rush would never use these hands again. He’d never hold a piece of chalk between these fingers. He wouldn’t write with them, wouldn’t code with them, wouldn’t manipulate the ship’s systems with them.

And he’d never stride through the hallways on these agile legs. Never wave these arms in dramatic arcs to make a point or dismiss a particularly dense shipmate. Never smirk with this tempting mouth. Never lift these mobile brows in amusement or entreaty or sheer disdain at whatever question or command Young had just uttered. He would never quite, not _quite_ , be Rush again.

A wave of grief washed over Young at that thought.

“Colonel Young?” Eli said uncertainly.

Young sighed and reached up to slide his fingers through his hair, only to remember that he had tied it back. Right. It was amazing how fast new habits could form.  

“It’s okay, Eli,” he said, finally lifting his eyes.  

Eli looked as though he were caught between guilt and alarm. The hints of relief and hope that had warred for supremacy with his more negative emotions a few minutes earlier had been wiped away. “It doesn’t look okay,” he said. “This wouldn’t have happened if I had just stayed in the stones room and kept an eye on Rush. I mean, how many times has the guy screwed us over before? You’d think by now I would--”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Young interrupted. “This is Rush’s fault, and he’s living with the consequences, same as I am. Let’s leave it at that, okay?”

Eli looked unconvinced.

Young managed to summon up a small, reassuring smile. Something about seeing Eli’s distress on his behalf lessened his own. “Go back to the stones and stand by for further orders.”

Clearly this was not quite the order Eli was expecting to receive. He hesitated, opened his mouth, then apparently thought better of whatever he had been about to day. He rose from the coffee table and headed obediently toward the door.

Young picked up his radio and thumbed the talk button. “Rush,” he said, “there’s something I’d like to discuss with you in my quarters.” There, that wasn’t quite an order. More like a statement of fact. Maybe Rush would see it as the concession it was and would cooperate for once.

Eli swung back around hastily. “No!” he said in obvious agitation. “You can’t… He’ll--”

There was a crackle from Young’s radio, and then Rush’s voice - or rather, Young’s voice laced with Rush’s accent - cut through Eli’s objection. “I’m rather busy at the moment.” The words were followed by the sound of something heavy and metallic hitting the ground with a dull thunk.

Young could see out of the corner of his eye that Eli was still trying to telegraph his strong disapproval and alarm, but he ignored him. “It’s important,” he told Rush, careful to keep his tone earnest instead of belligerent.  

There was a pause, and then Rush said curtly, “All right, I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Rush out.”

Well, might as well celebrate the small victories.

Young set aside his radio and glanced back at Eli, who was staring at him in a way that could only be described as beseeching. “I’m not going to make a decision with this many repercussions for Rush without at least informing him of it ahead of time,” Young told him gently.

“But…” Eli blinked at him in utter confusion. “But it’s not like he’d do the same for you,” he pointed out. “Seriously, he wrecked the stones’ code behind your back, and that had major repercussions for _everyone_.  Why--”

“That’s exactly why, Eli,” Young said.

Eli’s confusion didn’t abate, and he was starting to look frustrated as well. “Yeah, I don’t get that,” he said testily.

Oh, the joys of command. You make a mistake and everyone’s at your throat. You try to do the right thing and everyone condemns you for it. You just can’t win for losing either way. Young suppressed a sigh. “I know you don’t,” he said. “You’re going to have to trust me on this. Now go on back to the stones.”

Eli hesitated again.

“ _Go_ ,” Young repeated, and while Rush’s voice wasn’t very effective at delivering orders with Young’s signature growl of authority, it could project quite nicely.

Eli went.

Young watched him go, wondering if the kid was aware of the added responsibility he would be shouldering in the future. The next time Destiny found herself in a crisis that required quick thinking and an advanced understanding of the ship’s systems, her fate would rest in Eli’s hands. It was unlikely that Rush would be able to come up with a solution in a timely manner, given his new limitations.

Rush might still be the resident expert on ancient technology, but he no longer possessed his former mental acuity. Young knew his own brain well enough to guess that Rush was having a frustrating time with it. Young had never been stupid, but he had never been _quick_ either. Rush’s brain, on the other hand, made connections so rapidly that it seemed to skip over intermediate steps and arrive at its final conclusions as if by magic. It was a heady feeling for someone who had spent his childhood methodically working out concepts that his classmates had seemed to understand intuitively. But as much as Young was enjoying the new experience, he realized that his gain was Destiny’s loss. Rush’s future contributions to the mission were likely to be of a different nature than before, and much less to his taste.

The fact that Rush’s predicament was mostly his own fault did not lessen Young’s sympathy for him. It was a cruel fate for such a brilliant man, however self-inflicted. And speaking of cruelty…

Young glanced at the coffee table where a small stack of Brody’s handmade paper sat innocently off to one side. Eli hadn’t seemed to notice it, which was just as well. Young picked up the papers and flipped through them, taking quiet pleasure in the neat rows of conjugated Ancient verbs filling every page. It was almost hard for him to believe that they were his own work, the evidence of his recent studies. Hard to believe that he was making progress so quickly, committing new information to memory so easily. It was an incredible feeling. It soothed an ache somewhere deep inside his chest and granted a measure of peace to his churning mind.

Still, it was best not to let Rush see this evidence that Young was putting his brain to good use. That would be twisting the knife a little too far. He needed to put these out of sight.

By the time Young heard approaching footsteps in the hallway, his conjugated verbs were safely tucked away in a lockbox. He was perched on the corner of his desk, idly playing with Rush’s mended glasses when Rush walked through the open doorway. Their eyes met, and Young’s breath hitched. Rush looked exhausted. No, more than exhausted. His weariness seemed to extend beyond the physical. He appeared muted, as if the bright-burning light of his will was slowly dying away to embers. He looked like he was losing himself.

“Rush,” Young said rather more sharply than he had intended.

Rush stiffened slightly at Young’s tone. His eyes swept over him, then zeroed in on his hands. “I’m glad to see you’re putting my glasses to good use,” he commented dryly, “but while I do appreciate symmetry, I suggest you don’t break them any further. They are irreplaceable, after all.”

Young set aside the glasses, which he had in fact been gripping rather tightly in his dismay over Rush’s appearance. It occurred to him that the glasses were not the only thing in the room that was damaged yet irreplaceable, and he wondered if Rush had been deliberately speaking in metaphor. But no, Rush would never admit to a weakness like that. The parallel must be the work of Young’s own imagination.

Still feeling somewhat off balance, Young made the mistake of asking, “When was the last time you slept?”

Rush’s mildly contemptuous expression went flat, and Young knew from experience that he was one wrong word away from bolting. “I _sleep_ ,” Rush hissed through his teeth, “all the bloody fucking _time_. I seem to do nothing else anymore, and it’s hell on my productivity. But thank you so much for asking. How are _you_ sleeping?”

Young rubbed the back of his neck. His muscles weren’t knotted up and throbbing anymore, but the motion had become a nervous habit. “Not a whole lot,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t seem to matter. I feel fine.”

And that had been the wrong thing to say. Shit. Rush was already turning to leave. “Fascinating,” he threw back over his shoulder. “If you’d no better reason to drag me across the ship than to exchange notes on our respective sleeping habits--”

“Rush.”

Rush paused with his back facing Young. There was visible tension in the set his shoulders, but he stood straight and still in front of the doorway. Giving Young the opportunity to say the right thing, to reel him back into the room. Young was grateful to him for that small indulgence.  

“Eli was just in here,” he said, deciding to cut right to the chase. Exchanging pleasantries had never really been their style anyway. “He found a way to reset the stones.”

That got Rush’s attention. He whirled back around and stared at Young in consternation. “How? There’s no way he could have fixed the code so quickly. Or at _all_.”

Young watched Rush’s face, noting the tiny flicker of hope amidst the confusion, disbelief, and fear. He sighed, knowing he was about to squash that little bit of hope like an ant under his boot. “He tells me he found a backup of the stones’ code in the database,” he said.

Rush’s brows drew together for a moment, and then he ducked his head in what looked like an acknowledgement of defeat. “I see,” he said ruefully. “Of course. So the stones can be fixed, but _we_ can’t.” Probably the worst of all possible worlds, as far as Rush was concerned.

“Yeah,” Young said, feeling slightly sick.

“So,” Rush murmured, “I suppose it’s already being done, then.”

“No.”

Rush jerked his head up. “No? You haven’t given the order?”

“Not yet. I wanted to talk it over with you first.”

Rush’s lips parted and his eyelids fluttered in surprise. Then he drew a few steps closer, gazing at Young with that intensely focused expression which always made him feel like he was caught in the headlights of an oncoming semi. “Why?” Rush demanded. “I broke the things in the first place.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Young said dryly.

“I had compelling reasons for doing so.”

“So you said.”

“Reasons,” Rush said, moving yet closer, “that still stand. So why bother to ask my opinion now?”

They were only a couple feet apart now. Young could see the strain around Rush’s eyes, the lines of stress across his forehead. Young’s own face looked aged by half a decade at least. His dark curls were wild, almost as if they had been deliberately rumpled. Rush looked tired, uncouth, and on edge, and Young couldn’t help softening toward him.

“Because this is what we do, Rush,” he said. “I consult you before I make any major decisions. If we weren’t trying to keep your part in this mess a secret, I’d have pulled Camile in here too.”

Rush squinted at Young as if he expected to find the answer to a particularly perplexing math problem scribbled across his forehead. Young just returned his gaze steadily and waited him out.

“Well, I don’t think you should give the order,” Rush said finally. “But I suppose that’s what you were expecting me to say.”

“More or less.”

Rush walked away, tugging at his curls distractedly. Ah. So that’s how they got to be in that state. “Whatever safeguards you put in place, Homeworld Command _will_ try something like this again eventually. They don’t seem capable of resisting the urge to interfere and micromanage, and--”

“And you don’t have a lot of friends there,” Young said.

Rush flung up an arm to sweep aside this comment. “This isn’t just about me,” he said, pacing the stretch of floor between Young’s bed and the nearest couch. “It never was. It could affect anyone on this ship. In case you’ve forgotten, you were to be kept in Colonel Telford’s body for an unstated period of time as well. They didn’t trust _you_ either, or they wouldn’t have considered that precaution necessary. How long do you think it would be before you were permanently replaced?”

Young was surprised Homeworld Command hadn’t tried it already, quite frankly. He had made enough mistakes during his tenure on Destiny to make him their primary target, not Rush. Why had they gone after Rush first? Telford’s influence, he supposed. “ _No one_ is getting replaced,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll have the IOA’s support on this, but either way, our safeguards _will_ hold.”

“The IOA,” scoffed Rush. “You’re pinning your hopes on that incompetent and power-hungry organization?”

“I’m pinning my hopes on Camile, actually.”

Rush seemed to consider this for a few seconds before shaking his head. “Even if you somehow manage to win over Homeworld Command on this issue, the stones will still remain an ongoing distraction that this crew doesn’t need.”

“A distraction,” Young repeated.

Rush spun toward him. “Yes,” he snapped, “a _distraction_. A false hope. A crutch. It compromises their ability to contribute to the mission because they’re all too focused on what’s behind them to see the incredible opportunity staring them in the face.”

“So getting to spend time with their loved ones, that’s just a distraction?” Young asked.

Rush blinked and then made an impatient gesture as if to ward off an unpleasant memory. Was he thinking of Eli’s almost tearful reaction to the prospect of never seeing his mother again? Or was someone else in his thoughts? Chloe, perhaps? She seemed to be one of the few people he felt any degree of tenderness toward, and she, too, had a mother back on Earth. “If we accomplish Destiny’s mission, then we can--”

“Then we can what, return to Earth?” Young cut in. “You don’t know that, and you don’t know whether it will even happen within any of our lifetimes.”

“Still, we need to--”

Young decided that his own personal store of cooperative spirit was about dried up for the day. He had heard Rush out, and now it was time for Rush to do some listening. “No, we don’t,” he interrupted. “What we need to do is consider what would _actually_ happen to the crew if we were permanently cut off from Earth. You really think they’d all suddenly become more enthusiastic about Destiny’s mission? Well, think again.”

He hopped off the desk and strode up to Rush, who was watching him with a wary expression.  Young still wasn’t quite used to looking up into his own face, but he no longer felt even the smallest trace of intimidation standing in Rush’s shadow like this. “What would you have done if Homeworld Command had successfully trapped you in McKay’s body? What if you were cut off from your work - from Destiny - forever?”

Rush didn’t look like he wanted to contemplate that question, so Young stepped a little closer and pushed a little harder. “What would you _do_ , Rush?”

Rush’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again. “I don’t know,” he said, and the words came out as a low growl.

“Would you do something drastic? Maybe try to fight back? I know what a fighter you can be when you’re pushed too far. Or maybe you’d just get depressed. Sink so deep you can’t claw your way back out again. Lose all sense of purpose and just go dark inside.”

Rush stared at him impassively, lips pressed together in a straight, tight line.

“Well,” Young continued, “I’ll tell you what you _wouldn’t_ do. You wouldn’t jump into another project, all gung-ho and ready to work on something new. You wouldn’t have it in you. Not right after a loss like that.”

“I see what you’re doing,” Rush said irritably, “but the situations aren’t similar.”

“They are,” Young insisted. “Your work keeps you going. Take that away and you can’t function. You know it’s true; you need it. You couldn’t even stay away from it when you were recovering from _heart surgery_ , for god’s sake. But for most people on this ship, what keeps them going is contact with Earth. Seeing their family and friends. Walking around outside without having to worry about getting kidnapped by aliens. Even just enjoying a hamburger now and then. They need that. Without it, they’ll lose hope. And in my experience, people who have lost hope tend to either break down or turn dangerous.”

Rush was watching him carefully now, his brows drawn together in thought. Young wondered what he was thinking about and whether any of this was making an impression. It was sometimes difficult to tell with Rush. Young decided to press on anyway.

“If I go out there now and announce to everyone that the communication stones are permanently broken,” he continued, “I can almost guarantee that we’ll find ourselves in a shitstorm beyond anything we’ve dealt with so far. We’ll lose half the crew to sheer despondency, and the other half will be in full revolt.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Rush said, but his voice lacked conviction.

Young shook his head emphatically. “I’m not. I’ve been at this a long time, and I’ve seen what happens when morale hits rock-bottom. But so have you, come to think of it. Remember Sergeant Spencer?”

Something flickered in Rush’s eyes at Spencer’s name. His head tilted to one side, and his eyes slid away from Young’s. Revisiting unpleasant memories, or considering the merits of Young’s argument? Young couldn’t tell. He rather regretted mentioning Spencer, though. That had not been a good time. For anyone. So many things had changed since then. Most notably, his perception of Rush.

“Yes,” Rush said after a long pause, startling Young out of an uncomfortable reverie.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I remember Spencer,” Rush said impatiently, frowning down at Young as if he considered him mentally deficient. Good to know some things never changed. “Give the order, then. Reset the stones. It’s not as though you didn’t already have your mind made up before you called me in here anyway.”

Young felt something within his chest unknot, and suddenly it was just a little bit easier to breathe. Jesus. He hadn’t realized quite how much importance he had placed on Rush’s acceptance of his decision, however grudging that acceptance might be. Without it, Young would have felt like a monster giving an order that could, conceivably, compromise Rush’s future on Destiny. Which was grossly unfair, all things considered, but it was not news to Young that he was in possession of an overzealous conscience (while Rush, on the other hand, appeared to possess none at all).

“I wanted to give you a chance to explain your reasoning, and then I wanted to explain mine,” Young said, tamping down on his relief before it could show on his face. “Things seem to go better for us when we actually talk.”

“Ah,” was all Rush had to say to that. His posture was stiff and he still seemed impatient, as if he considered their conversation over and now wished to be as far away from Young as possible. Which was also quite a familiar look on him, but a disheartening one.

Young turned away to retrieve his radio. He braced his hip against the back of the couch and glanced in Rush’s direction as he radioed Eli. Rush just looked back at him indifferently.

“Eli, this is Young. Reset the stones.”

Eli’s response was immediate and breathless with relief. “Okay. Okay, good. I’m on it.”

Young lowered the radio and offered Rush a small smile.

Rush returned it, but with an ironical twist. “Well, if that’s all,” he said brusquely.“I was in the middle of something when you pulled me halfway across the ship.”

“That’s all,” Young said, suppressing a sigh.

Rush turned away without another word. He made it as far as the doorway before he paused and spun slowly back around to face Young. “You wanted to know what I’d do if Homeworld Command succeeded in removing me from Destiny,” he said in a thoughtful tone.

Young tilted his head and raised his brows, silently inviting him to continue.

Rush smiled again, but this time it was was a flash of gritted teeth and blazing eyes. It was pretty damn intimidating, and Young was mildly impressed that his face could even do that. “I’d fight,” Rush said simply. “I’d never stop fighting to get back.”

“Yeah,” said Young after a moment’s reflection, “that sounds like you.”

They watched each other across the room as the fire died away from Rush’s gaze and his expression turned uncertain. He seemed on the verge of saying something else, but he opted to walk away instead. Young listened to the sound of his retreating footsteps in the hall and then slowly shook his head.

“Fuckload of work,” he muttered under his breath.

 


	11. Chapter 11

There surely could be nothing more infuriating, Rush thought as his feet lead him who knew where through Destiny’s corridors. He could think of nothing more infuriating than being forced to leave his work in order to go through a pantomime of ‘consultation’ over an issue where the outcome had been pre-judged from the start.

That must make him very angry.

Yet it didn’t. The place from which fury should have come seemed unaccountably empty. The little ball of lava he carried around especially for Young had gone missing somewhere, and its absence was disconcerting. He should have been angry. He wanted to be angry. But he wasn’t.

His feet brought him to the mess, and that was not a bad idea. At least, now the stones were to be reset, he should no longer be in physical danger from disgruntled shipmates. Over the past week he had subsisted on tea and the night-shift’s leftovers, and even a bowl of protein slop sounded good as a result.

Becker’s eyes flared wide as he handed Rush a full plate. His mouth dropped slightly as he searched Rush’s new face as if to determine what was behind it. Beside Becker the two airmen on KP duty froze in their places as if they had stumbled on a scorpion. _Oh,_ thought Rush, _yes of course, the news wouldn’t have reached this far yet._ Perhaps he had been a little premature.

“Something the problem, gentlemen? Do tell.” He plucked the ‘tomatoes’ from the plate and put them in his pocket. A glance at the tables behind him showed them to be occupied mainly by marines, though the scattering of civilians among them did not look more friendly. Deciding against sitting down, he shoveled the paste into his mouth as fast as possible while holding Becker’s gaze in challenge.

Becker closed his mouth and gave him a wry little grin. “No sir,” he said, elbowing his glaring companions pointedly. “Business as usual, I reckon.”

Rush felt pathetically grateful for the support, and again, not angry at that fact. Where the hell had it gone, his defiance? He needed it to survive.

“Well, that was delicious as always,” he thrust the empty bowl back into Becker’s hands. “I can see why everyone frequents this place. It’s not for the ambiance, that’s evident.”

“No sir, the Air Force does not consider ambiance a priority, sir.”

Rush nodded to Becker for his kindness, wheeled and went out, feeling all the eyes in the room on him like knives. His spine was lacerated by them as he returned to his quarters, and he shut the door as if he was shutting out a pursuing gang.

He should perhaps give it a little while for the news of the stones’ repair to filter through the ship’s grapevine before he tried that again.

Sitting heavily on the edge of the bed, he put his head in his hands and groaned, startled yet again by his own voice. He really never got used to that - didn’t want to get used to it, but thanks to Young it seemed he was going to have to.

Again, he reached for anger and found nothing. The back of his mind was both clear and full. He knew the feeling - he’d had it before, when he was working on theorems too complex for his conscious mind to encompass, when he was waiting for a burst of inspiration. Eli must have felt like this when he turned the problem of the ninth chevron on its head and thereby solved it.

Rush’s mind was full like an egg that was just about to crack from within and spill forth something completely new. The trouble was that he had a vague premonition of the shape of the thing that was inside, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to let it hatch.

He pulled his boots off and thunked down onto the bed on his back, trying to distract himself by slowly chewing on the tomatoes. The first-fruits of the new hydroponic garden, they tasted better than the last - or maybe it was just that his standards had become so very low. Tomatoes could only last so long, however, and when they were done his thoughts circled back to his problems with a wearying relentlessness. He might not want his idea to hatch but his mind would never let him rest until it did.

It had certainly been... uninviting... in the mess. It reminded him of their arrival here, when it wasn’t certain that Young would live, when the crew was freshly tumbled into the gate room, panicky and angry and lost. Rush had thought then that they would recognize that he knew what he was talking about and they would follow him because of that. He’d even gone so far as to suppose that, in their abject state, they would be grateful to him for keeping a level head, for knowing what needed to be done and for telling them to do it. He had thought he would have them in the palm of his hand.

Oh and he had indeed. They’d weighed in the palm of his hand just like one of those cartoon bombs with the fuse lit. He could still, if he let himself, recall the throat clutch of terror at the knowledge that they were all going to blow up in his face.

Then Scott had stepped in, lulling the mob into an uneasy peace, with his appeal to higher authority and his gun. Once Young was back, those same panicky, aggressive creatures had calmed down, begun teaming up, learning about the ship, relaxing enough to laugh about it. For all Rush had taunted both of them for their senseless pandering to the lowest common denominator, the sad fact was that their methods evidently worked. Human beings, irrational as they were, did indeed behave, en masse, in ways that Young and his officers had been taught to recognize and exploit - ways that were perfectly mysterious to Rush.

In which case, Young could be right, and re-opening the stones could be the best way to avoid a bloodbath.

It was hard to believe that Young could be right about anything. Grabbing the corner of his quilt he rolled himself in it, feeling his mood lift at the thought. Almost by itself his mouth quirked up and he set his hand to it to feel the shape of his lips with his fingertips. He closed his eyes, warm and full and awash with a strange nostalgia all of a sudden at the thought of Young trying to explain to him how human nature worked.

Because Gloria had used to do that too. The week before Christmas, she would just have finished putting up the tree, tinsel-ends winking like distant galaxies in her golden hair and glitter all over her hands that had rubbed off the spun glass baubles she had inherited from her parents. He didn’t hold with any of it, so the decorating was her responsibility. She romped through it with dignified delight because she loved it, but she insisted that he had to write the cards.

That year he had automated the entire process - thought up a suitably generic message that could be sent to anyone, got in a couple of engineering students to build a small assembly line into which he could feed a stack of Christmas cards and envelopes, have their message and signatures printed, the envelope addressed and franked, card and envelope united, flap glued down and a neat pile of correspondence ready to post fifteen minutes later. Looked forward to having that problem solved for the rest of his life.

Gloria had laughed about it on and off for three years afterwards, but she had still made him include a handwritten message with each one, and didn’t allow him to have either a kiss or a whisky until he was done.

“The time you waste doing this? That’s the point of it, darling. Some of these people, we don’t talk to for the rest of the year. When they get a card and they see that you’ve written it with your own hand, they know that you still care about them enough to take time out of your schedule to think about them. An automated card isn’t the same, because the card itself is not the point. The effort and the care and the time you spend writing it for them, that’s what makes it worth sending at all.”

Gloria had been the one who coached him through all of those things. “I know Evie said we mustn’t buy her anything, but she didn’t actually mean it. What? No it’s not hypocrisy, she was being polite.”

He recalled her vividly laughing in the kitchen at one faculty party with her hair tumbled forward around her face and her hand pressed to her mouth because he had grown so exasperated with the small talk that he had put the weather channel on. “You thought they actually wanted to know about the weather!” she had gasped, with her bared shoulders shaking. “Darling, I love you. Don’t ever change.”

He had been bemused often, and charmed, but at the same time he knew that she understood more about the universe than he did - that she had a deep and valuable insight into a part of the human condition that had “Here be dragons” written over it for him. She made their friends and guests welcome, held together their social circle, created, for him, a space where he had been accepted into a small group of people who he had liked, and who seemed to like him. She had been, for him, the ‘in’ to a world of companionship that he had never known before and was never to know again. He missed her so very much that he had never before noticed that he also missed that.

It was blasphemous to think of Gloria and Young in the same context, but...

Oh, there was a drop-off at the end of that thought. The ground he stood on ended there and he didn’t want to step out into the unknown beyond.

Anyway. He turned over, winding himself more firmly in the quilt until he was swaddled like a fractious child. He should probably do some work but his eyes were heavy, and the swelling press of a new universe inside his mind was distracting. He should let it burst before trying to do anything else.

Why, though, would it be blasphemous? Gloria had hated bullies as much as Rush did, but she would not have been the enemy of a quiet, studious boy, who only wanted to be allowed to pursue his own dream. Rush would not have been that boy’s enemy either. If he’d only known...

There went another foot of land, crumbling into the void, because he’d just assumed - he’d _assumed_ all of the military personnel were like Tom. Little boys, trying to make themselves feel big with their guns and their violence and their hard-fisted inhumanity. Whereas by now it was becoming clear that Scott was a bleeding heart, Greer a white knight. TJ would weep over a cut flower, and Young...

Rush pulled his pillow over his head as if this would keep his hatching understanding away until he could make himself ready for it. All it did was to close him in more tightly with his thoughts.  
  
“I recognize, I did provoke you,” he’d said, all that long time ago. So he’d known it even then, he just hadn’t understood it to the core. He hadn’t _felt_ it. It seemed more significant now – the realization that when he killed Rush, Young must have thought he was defending himself. Not without reason, he had blamed Rush for Franklin’s fate. Not without reason, he must have believed he was defending the crew from similar incidences in the future.

Young had killed Rush because Rush had attacked him - he had killed him because he thought _Rush_ was the bully.

Murder was still something of an overreaction, but it was one with which Rush could eagerly sympathize. He knew what it was to hunt an enemy down and splash their brains on the rocks because they’d hurt you, because they deserved it, because the world would be a better place without them.

Like all thoughts that changed the world, this was simple and obvious once he’d seen it, though it had been unthinkable before.

Young was... perhaps not as unlike himself as he’d supposed - they’d both been attacking an enemy that didn’t actually exist. All the wounds they had done each other, that could not now be healed, had been unnecessary. If he had known! If he had just known, before it was too late…

A kind of agony swelled up in his ribcage, pushing against it until he was so full of it he thought he must pop. And that was ridiculous because, while perhaps it merited some regret that they had never been friends, Young was still not worth this kind of pain. Rush had had slow children among his students before, and while they were harmless enough he could not help but pity them. Hardworking, diligent, bovine creatures that they were, always a step behind everyone else. They seemed too heavy, too drudging for the wonder, curiosity and imagination that were mankind’s highest traits.

Which was why it was blasphemous to associate Young and Gloria in one thought. Gloria had heard the voices of the universe. When she played, Rush could hear them too. All the questions that he tried to answer with maths, all the elegance and sweetness and holiness that he sometimes touched when the numbers came together, she spoke in her music. She said there wasn’t a better language for it, that she couldn’t translate it for him, but he knew she understood. He saw that vision in her - how it consecrated her from inside. He could not have loved anyone without it

At best - if he was being generous - he would admit that Young knew enough about the base motivations of commonplace humanity to keep some order among the herd. And that was useful. It was good - an enormous relief, to be frank - to know that he and Young were not predestined to be enemies. To know he was physically safe was an incalculable benefit, but he need not go any further than that.

He took the pillow off his head and breathed in the fresh air, feeling braced. From the white noise this revelation had made coming he’d thought it would be bigger, but he was glad to have it integrated into his thoughts nevertheless. It was good to go to sleep and know that he had one enemy less than he had thought, even if that ex-enemy was still a dull, uninspired creature he could never have called a friend.

 

* * *

 

_He dreams of flying._  
  
 _He’s alone in the cockpit of an F-302 and the horizon of an alien world curves down on either side of his viewscreen. The planet’s sun is behind it. It’s a ball of diamond dust as the cities down there twinkle. He’s kissing the very edges of the atmosphere with the aerospike engines thrumming in his ears, and the stars everywhere around him shine undimmed. Two galaxies in the sky - they’re colliding at their outer edges and stars of every color and intensity are dancing and dying among a dust of worlds._

_Tomorrow he’s helping with an evacuation, but right now he’s chasing the sunrise at mach 6. The first rays filter up through the planet’s atmosphere as he gets close. The diamond-spattered backdrop both dims and lights at the edges like a fire-opal, and then there’s a curve of fire white as apple blossom as the sun bursts out of hiding, and all of a sudden the planet below is blue and white and round as a drop of water._

_He veers, engages the boosters, flies out, into the immensity and freedom, the glory and wonder of outer space. Here he is in the clear heart of the universe, breathing and looking and gulping down awe in long swallows. The labor and the toil and the doubt – it was all worth it. He would do it again in a heartbeat, because this? Flying on the edge of infinity? This is where he belongs._

 

* * *

 

Rush was not aware of waking. At some point, dreams of flying must have become a reality of lying in a darkened room with star-stuff streaming past the windows. But it took about three seconds after that for it to hit him - how utterly he had cocked everything up.

He’d been quite right. The revelation had been bigger than he had initially thought. Now he would not be able to stuff it back inside and return to normality no matter how he tried. _Shit, shit, fucking shite_ , he curled forward and covered both eyes with his hands. If he’d only known... If he could go back and do it again now he did…

But he couldn’t. He’d wanted someone alongside him on this project with the imagination to truly grasp its greatness, with the _soul_ to know that it was worth everything. He’d taken Young’s refusal to head the mission as clear proof that Young was not that person. For God’s sake, the man had been a wreck. It had seemed for months as if Rush was the only one who could see that Young was mentally unstable - his personal life a shambles, his professional competence and nerve waning by the day.

Rush had not been wrong - he _had not been wrong_ \- to think this mission deserved better than that. It was important to know that his reasoning had been valid, that he had not completely lost touch with reality, or been blinded by childhood traumas. It was important to know he could still trust his own process.

But, when he chose Young for this mission, perhaps O’Neill had not been quite as inexplicably boneheaded as Rush had supposed. Perhaps… what was it he had said? Perhaps now Young was ‘clawing his way out of darkness’ he might even turn out to be what Rush had hoped for from the start.

There had been glimpses of it. It still caught at Rush’s heart if he remembered Young volunteering to stay aboard with him without a moment’s thought, keeping Rush’s dream alive perhaps because he shared it. For a moment there he had imagined he was not alone.

And it had been _so good_. The thought that he might come in from the cold, that he might no longer be a pariah, that someone might care about him again…

The heels of his hands were wet where they pressed into his eyes. He rubbed them dry with a flare of anger, because he didn’t deserve to cry about how hard he had it. Visionaries and great men were always outcasts, it was pathetic to wish it could be otherwise.

That was the worst thing, though. Because perhaps it could have been.

If he had helped Young from the start rather than undermining him, would the man still have crashed and burned as he did, or would he have picked himself up sooner? Would Rush have realized sooner that he _had_ everything he wanted right there? If Rush had not set himself against Young would he still have been treated as an enemy? If he had always told the truth, might he have been believed?

But it was too late to wonder about that. They’d both had the chance to helm this mission as one of the SGC’s legendary partnerships, and they’d fucked it up between the two of them to the stage where it could not be repaired. Now the stones were reconnected, Young’s assurances notwithstanding, Homeworld Command would replace him and he would lose that too.

He hadn’t even fully grasped that it was something he wanted until now.

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know it's not Wednesday. ;) I'll be away from my computer for most of tomorrow, so you're getting this week's chapter a day early.

It was night. More accurately, it was that part of the established twenty-four hour cycle on Destiny which had been arbitrarily designated as ‘night.’ For most of the crew who were not scheduled for the graveyard shift, that meant it was time to sleep. For Chloe, that meant it was time to wake up in a cold sweat after another gut-churning nightmare and then go to the mess for a soothing cup of herbal tea. And then it was time to pad through the hallways on bare feet and listen to the ship’s ambient noises until the images of alien faces and the sensation of suspension in water and the slow-crawling awareness of involuntary metamorphosis lost their sickening clarity and faded back into memory. It was becoming an almost nightly ritual.  

Chloe held her mug close to her chest as she made her rounds through the inhabited parts of Destiny. Tonight she was not merely wandering, but walking with a purpose in mind. She wanted to find Rush. Because tonight’s dream had been different - it had not featured her. She had merely been a bystander, forced to watch helplessly as  _ Rush _ changed, as  _ Rush _ lost himself and became something other. The dream had hit a little too close to home. It had left a bitterness in her mouth that the taste of the tea couldn’t quite mask and a chill in her core that its warmth couldn’t quite thaw. She just wanted to see him, talk to him, make sure that under that borrowed skin he wore, he was still himself.

Rush was not in any of the places where she would expect to find him at this time of night, and Chloe was beginning to consider that he might, almost inconceivably, be asleep, when it occurred to her to check the observation deck. He had been known to take his work there from time to time. 

When the door slid open and she caught sight of a virtual console on the right side of the room, Chloe thought she had found him. She was only half right. It was Rush’s slight figure seated on the bench in front of the glowing console, but she knew it wasn’t Rush who inhabited it. 

“Colonel Young?” she said, approaching the bench slowly.

He turned his head and smiled at her. It was a fond little smile, one he seemed to reserve only for her and Eli. And it was very like the smile Rush wore whenever he was proud of her, although she hadn’t made that connection until this moment. 

“Can’t sleep?” he asked sympathetically.

“Can sleep,” she sighed. “Would prefer not to.”

His gaze sharpened with comprehension, and she realized that he, too must know everything there was to know about nightmares. Strangely, that thought had never occurred to her before.

Young glanced back at the holographic screen in front of him, drawing her attention back to its presence.

“You figured out how to call up a virtual console, then,” she said, leaning closer.  

Young patted the spot on the bench beside him, inviting her to join him and get a better look. Although she was still feeling concerned about Rush, she couldn’t resist the chance to see this newly discovered feature of Destiny. Besides, she had been wanting an opportunity to talk to the Colonel privately since the stones were fixed a week ago. She slid onto the bench beside him.

“Eli’s been trying to do this for the past two weeks. He’s pretty frustrated over it,” she said.

“Has he tried asking nicely?” Young asked, eyes still on the screen.

Chloe shot him a sidelong look. His lips twitched with imperfectly contained amusement. “No, I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “Is that really all it takes?”

“So simple a genius couldn’t figure it out.”

“Except for Rush,” she pointed out.

“Special case,” Young replied. “Destiny’s been talking to him for a while. But I doubt he asks nicely.”

“He can be nice,” Chloe said. 

Young let out a grunt of disbelief. 

“He is  _ capable _ of being nice,” she amended. “Even if he doesn’t choose to be so very often.”

Young didn’t answer, so Chloe let her focus shift back to the console before her. The screen displayed some sort of document in Ancient, but it was unlike anything she had seen in the database before. It appeared to be a work of fiction, and it was written in a strangely simplistic style. Small words, short sentences, no plot to speak of. It took her an embarrassing amount of time to realize that she was looking at the Ancient equivalent of a  _ Dick and Jane _ book.

“Oh,” she said, and it came out as a breathless laugh.

The Colonel chuckled at her reaction. “Scintillating stuff, huh? Sucks you right in.”

Chloe read a few more lines and shook her head, grinning. The thought of Colonel Young sitting up into the small hours pouring over children’s early readers was just too funny. “Eli mentioned something about you learning Ancient,” she said.

“Caught that, did he?” Young shook his head ruefully. “I thought he hadn’t noticed.”

“Eli tends to notice things.”

“He does at that,” Young agreed. “And I’m grateful to him for it.”

That seemed to dampen the mood a bit. Chloe imagined that they were both thinking about the stones, and about Rush. Eli had noticed that bit of treachery slightly too late, but at least he had found the means to fix it. Not without lasting consequences, however.  

Young’s smile had faded, and his deep, dark eyes were distant. He directed his gaze toward the screen in front of him, but it looked more like he was staring  _ through _ it at something that stood beyond it. Something, or possibly someone, that only he could see. For that one moment, he looked almost heartbroken, and Chloe had to clench her fingers around her mug to resist the urge to reach out to him. One did not give unsolicited comfort to Air Force colonels, no matter how vulnerable they appeared. So she decided to change the subject instead.

“Lisa told me that you spent over two hours asking her questions about the life support system a few days ago,” she said. “She seemed really pleased about it. She doesn’t get to feel useful very often any more.”

“I know,” he murmured. “We’re going to have to do something about that. Her knowledge and experience shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste.”

Which was a rather Rush-like thing for him to say, Chloe reflected, but at least he said it in a Young-like way. Practical, yet sympathetic. She decided not to comment.

“I also heard that you helped Brody and Volker with some maintenance on the FTL drive yesterday,” she said instead.

He laughed at that. “If by ‘helped,’ you mean I stood by uselessly and handed them pieces of equipment from time to time, then sure, I ‘helped.’ I was just there because I was curious. I figured it would be nice to have a slightly better understanding of some of the ship’s systems.” He turned to look at her, and the amusement died on his face. Clearly he saw something in her expression that bothered him. “Is that a bad thing?” he asked, looking vaguely concerned.

“Of course not,” she said hastily. “It’s just… why now?”

Young pressed his lips together thoughtfully at her question. Not because he didn’t know the answer, she sensed, but because he was wondering just how much he wanted to reveal to her. She let him take his time in answering, filling the slightly awkward moment by taking a sip of tea. 

“Well, this body only seems to need about four hours’ sleep in a day, so I have some extra time on my hands. And this brain seems to crave information like a drug, so I’m giving it what it wants.” He lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. “And I have to say, I’m enjoying it.”

That didn’t sound like quite the whole story. For all that Young was trying to sound casual about his recent activities, there was a defensive note in his tone contrasting with an eager light in his eyes that gave him away. Young’s new quest for knowledge had been undertaken quite deliberately and was clearly very important to him for some reason. Well, she was happy that he was getting something good out of this whole fiasco, but she couldn’t help being worried.

“The thing is,” she said slowly, “People have noticed. Matt told me that some of the military personnel are getting kind of uneasy about it. They’re afraid you’re turning into Rush.”

He exhaled sharply.  He appeared to be caught between amusement and annoyance. “I have Rush’s  _ body _ , not his personality.”

“You have his brain,” she murmured.

Young shot her a stern look. “I’m still me, Chloe.”

_ ‘Eli, this is  _ me _ talking _ ,’ her own voice echoed inside her head. And with that memory came the recollection of what it felt like to be slipping away, almost without knowing it. Trying to still be Chloe when she wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore. Starting to become a different version of herself. Starting to like it.

Chloe stared down into her cup and tried to put things back into perspective. This was nothing like her situation with the aliens. Even if they were gradually becoming hybrid versions of themselves, Rush and Young were still Rush and Young. They were just mixing up their Rush-ness and Young-ness a little bit. They were changing, that much was clear, but they weren’t turning into the enemy. They were just… different. In Young’s case, some of the differences seemed positive. In Rush’s case, on the other hand...

“I’m worried about Rush,” she whispered.

“I know,” Young said, taking her slightly by surprise. She turned to study his face, and found that he was watching her, too. His eyes were curious and troubled. “Has he said anything to you about all of this?” he asked.

“Not much,” she sighed. “He said something early on about how he didn’t know…”

“Didn’t know…?”

“If we would lose both of you. If you’d change.”

“Ah. Well, I think he has his answer to that by now,” Young muttered. “Has he said anything recently?”

Chloe shook her head. “No, I haven’t seen him much lately. It’s mostly what other people have said that has me worried.”

He lifted his brows and waited for her to continue. So he didn’t know, then. Not surprising. People were probably careful not to say too much around him, especially if they felt like he was becoming more and more like Rush.

“There are rumors going around that the whole disaster with the communication stones was Rush’s fault from the very beginning. That Telford and McKay had nothing to do it,” she said.

Young let out a low groan and rubbed at his eyes. “Of course there are. Nothing this crew loves better than a witch hunt. Did someone let it slip that he fucked up the stones’ code?”

“Not that I know of,” Chloe said. “Honestly… people don’t really need a reason to blame Rush for things.”

Young sighed in agreement. “At least the stones are fixed now. They can’t be  _ too _ riled up now that the problem’s solved.”

Chloe decided not to remind him that part of the problem wasn’t solved at all, and never would be. She was sad over the loss of the Rush and Young that she had known, but certain other people were  _ angry _ over it. And instead of accepting it as just one of those terrible, unforeseen things that happened on Destiny, they wanted someone to blame. Rush was the obvious and convenient choice.

“I wish he  _ would _ talk to me,” she commented. “He could use some friends right now, whether he wants to admit it or not.”

Young let out a derisive snort and slumped forward. He raked his fingers through his hair, loosening it from its makeshift tie. The graying mass swept down to hide his features from view. “Yeah,” he growled. “Well, that’s Rush for you. He’d rather make enemies of all the universe than make a single friend.”

Chloe blinked at him. There were  _ worlds _ of bitterness in that statement, and she felt like she had just stumbled into knowledge that wasn’t meant for her. God, he must be  _ deeply _ hurting over what Rush had done. She had seen him angry at Rush before, but she had never seen evidence that Rush had the power to emotionally wound him in this way. What the  _ hell _ was going on between them?

“I.. I think that might be a  _ little _ harsh,” she said cautiously.

He turned his head, peering at her through strands of Rush’s long hair. “Do you? You seem to know him better than most. So tell me, do you think he’s even  _ capable _ of caring for anyone? Besides himself, of course.”

Oh yeah. Chloe was definitely out of her depth here.

“Well… yes, I think so,” she said, slightly flustered. “I mean, he seemed to care very deeply for Doctor Perry. And I heard he was married, once.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, “he was. His wife had some sort of cancer, I think. He was on Icarus Base when she died. Or rather, he was at the site that was to become Icarus Base. He must have known she didn’t have long, but he went off-world anyway. What does that say about this feelings for her?”

Chloe didn’t have a good answer for that. She hadn’t known about any of this. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

Young bowed his head, letting his hair cover his face again. He sat there for several long moments with his shoulders hunched, hands clasped in his lap. “Neither do I,” he whispered finally.

She watched him for a few minutes, wondering if he would say more, but he seemed to have decided that their conversation was over. He maintained his prayerful posture, lost in his own thoughts. Chloe couldn’t blame him; she had some thinking of her own to do.

She would not try to find Rush tonight, she decided. He was probably asleep anyway, so there was no point. Instead, she would go back to Matt’s quarters and crawl into bed beside him. She’d snuggle into his warmth, wrap an arm over his chest, and reassure him when he stirred and asked if she was all right. Because even though many terrible things had happened to her since she arrived on Destiny four years ago, she could be thankful for one thing, at least. She had found a love that never turned her voice hollow with longing nor weighed down her shoulders with pain. And that was more than could be said for many people on this ship.


	13. Chapter 13

_Her gift to him is numbers made airborne. With each slide of her bow across her violin strings, she sends them spinning off like pinwheels, bright and colorful and perfect. In his more whimsical moments, he imagines plucking them from the air and holding them in his hands. He wishes he could give them back to her, make her see how beautiful they really are. But even if he could, she would only smile and shake her head at him for trying to define something spiritual in earthbound terms. He can never make her see that his relationship with maths is as close to spirituality as he ever comes._

_His gift to her is numbers made tangible. He has no words to express his admiration, so he gives her proofs instead of love letters. She accepts them laughingly, eyes shining with such brilliance that it tugs at his heart and energizes his mind. She papers over one wall of her flat with his mathematical tributes, calling it her shrine to incomprehensible beauty. Her friends tell her it’s just a phase - a temporary madness. But she smiles and strokes the numbers on her wall and says no, she doesn't think so._

_They marry on a stormy summer afternoon. He wears blue jeans, and she wears daisies in her hair. She doesn’t walk down any aisles and no one gives her away, but she plays violin, and he feels the music as an electric current under his skin. He buzzes with it all day, until finally it spills out as equations scribbled over every scrap of paper that comes to hand. When he runs out of paper, she offers him the use of her arms, and he covers her pale skin in numerical poetry._

_Their first flat together is drafty and cramped, and there isn’t space enough to keep their passions separate. His calculations and her sheet music are piled like snowdrifts on the floors and pinned side by side on the walls. They bleed into one another, secrets of the universe defined and undefined, and he silently revels in their intermingling. And when she plays for him - midnight concerts for an audience of one - he thinks he can sense the answers to all his burning questions hidden behind her notes. If only he knew how to listen and feel them as she does._

_In their next home they learn to be tidier. The numbers are relegated to a small study, and the music is stacked demurely on a bookshelf. But she still makes his skin buzz with every look and gesture, and sometimes he can’t hold the maths inside._

_One morning at the breakfast table she spills her coffee and reaches for a paper napkin. She has only just touched the corner of the napkin to the spill when he grabs her wrist and rescues it from her hand. It’s only then that she sees the numbers scrawled across it. She laughs and calls him ridiculous, and he knows it. She doesn’t realize that the napkin contains anything so frivolous as a calculation of the number of burnished hairs upon her head, and he’s not going to tell her. But he keeps the napkin, coffee stain and all, and carries it in his pocket._

_New opportunities carry them across an ocean and a continent, far away from the land she loves. Her will surrenders to his ambition, and she wears her defeat with quiet grace. He likes the way her hair gleams in the California sunshine. He likes to see her in their new house - larger and more beautiful than any space they have ever called theirs before - but he misses her bright laughter and ready smiles. She seems to have diminished before him, even as his own prospects have broadened to fill his horizon. In the evenings when he is closeted with his numbers, he hears strains of the violin through his study door. She plays only for herself now, and her homesickness is encoded within every musical phrase._

_Over time her spirits revive. He begins to notice her smiles peeking out from behind the rainclouds of her grief. She takes on new students, forms new friendships, and puts down fragile new roots in fertile soil. Their pristine new home gradually becomes littered with bits and pieces of themselves. He leaves numeric ciphers on her nightstand; she hums secrets while she makes his morning coffee. Pages of sheet music inexplicably find their way into his study, while his ubiquitous notepads roam like pack animals over the length and breadth of the house. Their marriage of maths and music is as strong as ever._

_Then cancer intrudes like an unwelcome guest, destroying their joy and filling their silences with heaviness. It clings to her while she plays, weighing down every note with foreboding. It follows him into his study, and the maths are no refuge from its sinister whispering. It cannot be escaped or ignored, only borne. She bears it like a queen. He trembles in its shadow._

_Her illness is not a battle to be decided in a matter of days or weeks. It is an endless march over broken ground. It is a twisting torment that dulls the mind and breaks the spirit. It is, at best, an uncertainty - at worst, a drawn-out ending. And he can’t apply his celebrated brain to this problem. He can’t save her the only way he knows how. He can only shy away from the sufferings of the physical realm and lose himself in the purely theoretical. But even in that mental sanctuary the plaintive sound of the violin follows him, and that, too, is a torment._

_Then a gleam of light bursts like a triumphant chorus into their lives. The cancer is in remission. Her smile radiates hope, and so does her music. The abiding ache within his chest fades away, and he can breathe again. By slow degrees a sense of normalcy and rightness returns. He no longer spends every evening hiding from the truth behind a curtain of maths, and her tears no longer fall on the polished maple surface of her instrument. They meet in the middle, their passions interweaving as always._

_On their next anniversary, she tucks a daisy into her hair and a pen into his hand. Then she bears herself to him, and he fills her willing canvas with coded expressions of his love._

_A new project appears on his horizon, glittering with all the brilliance of every star in every faraway galaxy, and in almost the same instant, her cancer resurfaces. He is torn between the numbers in his head and the grief in his heart, and it’s too much to cope with. He once offered her his heart, but his mind made no part of that gift. That is and always has been his alone. And he needs the work like he needs oxygen, so he breathes it in. He lets it fill up his vision until he can’t see her. He can’t look. He refuses to watch her fade away._

_Magnificent women should die like stars, painting distant skies with the lasting glow of their glorious endings. They should not be allowed to dwindle into colorless shells of their former selves. They should not slowly succumb to their fate with patient dignity. They should not weaken until the slight weight of a violin becomes too much for their shaking arms to bear. In what kind of universe could such a thing happen?_

_He can’t bear this. He turns away. He leaves her side to pursue his life’s work, and he knows - he_ hopes _\- she understands._

_He is worlds away when she passes. The news is delivered by a stranger. He doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t weep. Instead, he goes for a solitary walk under an alien sky, and he doesn’t notice the chill of the night air. He withdraws a cigarette and a lighter from his pocket, lights the cigarette, and sucks the smoke deep into his lungs._

_Then, with a hand that trembles only slightly, he reaches into another pocket and pulls out a crumpled paper napkin. Faded numbers are scrawled over the surface, and one corner is stained with spilled coffee. He rubs it between his fingers, closing his eyes. He sees a small, sunlit kitchen. He sees a queenly woman with gleaming hair. He sees beautiful lips curved into a teasing smile. He opens his eyes, sets the napkin alight, and lets it fall._

_The tiny funeral pyre flares bright in the darkness. As the paper curls and quickly turns to ash, he thinks he hears the distant sound of a solitary violin. The answers to his most pressing questions could be hidden within those haunting notes, but he never learned how to listen. And now he never will._

 

* * *

 

Young awoke from the dream with tears on his face and an unfamiliar name on his lips. “Gloria,” he gasped. “Oh… oh _god_.” A thousand pictures of a woman he had never seen flickered through his mind. Bright hair. Calm eyes. A sweet, knowing smile. There was so much pain associated with these images, but so, _so_ much love. It was too much to take in all at once. It was overpowering. With a broken cry, he turned his head and poured out another man’s grief into his pillow.

His wracking sobs gradually subsided. The storm of anguish calmed. He drew in deep gulps of air and felt the tremors in his body give way to a sort of aching lassitude. His mind cleared, and for a few blessed minutes he felt empty and cleansed of all emotion.

Gloria. The name floated amidst the white noise in his head, glittering like a distant star.

“Shit,” he whispered, rolling onto his back and wiping lingering traces of moisture from his face.

Had he really thought Rush incapable of caring for anyone? It seemed absurd now that he had experienced Rush’s love firsthand. And of course that love would be as beautiful and as complicated as the man himself. Of course it would be alternately passionate and serene, dauntless and anxious, reverent and self-indulgent. And of course, _of course_ , he would express it through numbers, tying one love to the other so intricately.

What would it be like to be the object of that kind of love? How would it feel to be the sunlight that brings color to another’s grayscale world? To be the inspiration, the center, the hub of someone else’s existence? The refuge they return to over and over again? The friend, the lover, the one they share their silences with?

Had he ever had that kind of relationship with Emily? Yes, perhaps, in the beginning. He remembered golden days and fevered nights and periods of comfortable coexistence. It was his fault that it had been lost. He had let his job carry him away from her side again and again, but he still couldn’t quite bring himself to regret that. To have done otherwise would have been to bury a vital part of himself. He couldn’t have betrayed himself in that way, not even for her.

It was true that Rush had left Gloria alone at the end of her life. And yes, maybe it had been selfish and maybe it had been cowardly, but was Young in any position to throw stones? He and Rush, they both needed their work. They had both built their lives, their very identities around it. Emily had never understood that, but perhaps Gloria had.

It would be different for him and Rush. Their work was intertwined; their mission was the same. They both knew how important it was and that everything else must be secondary. But they were in a unique position to fill each other’s needs, to each become that companion and ally and resting place that the other longed for. They could really make it work. They could…

 _Wait_.

Was he really thinking that way about himself and _Rush_? Was that really what he wanted?

Young sat up and pushed the covers away, suddenly claustrophobic. He raked his shaking fingers through sleep-disheveled hair and stared out into his bedroom. Racing starlight from the window cast a haunting, ever-changing glow over the walls and floor and furnishings. He’d found the effect eerie, once. Now it just looked like home.

So much had changed in the past four years. So many of those changes, good and bad, were attributable to Rush. It was no wonder that Rush had become a prime focus in his life, a preoccupation that had almost reached the point of obsession. Rush was a conundrum, a friend or foe by turns, fascinating and infuriating and completely unpredictable. It was understandable that much of Young’s mindshare had been given over to contemplating Rush’s character ever since their first meeting. And if he had occasionally thought about Rush’s physical attributes too, that didn’t mean anything. Young had been physically attracted to plenty of people he found otherwise repellant.

Except that he wasn’t repelled by Rush. He had hated him once, but even then, he had found something compelling about him. So perhaps this sudden yearning wasn’t as new as it felt. Perhaps he had wanted this for a while. Perhaps that was why it had come as such an emotional blow when Rush had broken the communication stones. Perhaps that’s why it had always felt like a hot poker through the heart whenever Rush had betrayed him.

“Shit,” he repeated, wrapping his arms around his slight form. He had begun to shake again. In his own body, he knew this cataclysmic restructuring of his worldview would have sent him sinking down into the depths of that dark pit where he kept all of his most ruinous emotions. Rush’s body apparently reacted to such revelations by attempting to rattle itself apart from the inside. Young wasn’t sure which was worse.

He didn’t need this. He didn’t _want_ this.

Except that he did. So, so much more than he had wanted anything in a very long time. He wanted this love. He wanted _Rush_.

And he would go on wanting. Because to Rush, he was just another playground bully. There was no poetry in Young’s soul to excite Rush, no cosmic secrets spilling from his fingers for Rush to ponder. He was a tired Air Force colonel and accidental expedition leader who cared too much and constantly fell short of everyone’s expectations. It was laughable to think that Rush could ever feel anything for him other than suspicion and contempt.

Young dropped back against the mattress with a groan and pulled the covers over his head. Maybe, if he was uncommonly lucky, he would just fall asleep and never, ever wake up again.


	14. Chapter 14

Rush set down the chalk with a click and stretched, clutching at his hair - not in distress, he just enjoyed the bouncy, resilient feel of it. He had begun to read over his equations again, double checking for errors when a light footstep outside the door startled him into lowering his hands, turning, automatically defensive, to assess the threat.

It was Chloe.

“It’s odd to see you here like that,” she said, smiling that winsome high-society-girl smile of hers that no longer looked quite so fake as it once had. He liked her better rumpled as she was these days - as they all were, for that matter. “You have...” her smile broadened and she waved at her own disheveled locks, “chalk in your hair. It’s gray - very distinguished.”

Chloe knew how to keep a secret.

“Don’t say anything just yet,” he returned the smile, “but you may not have to get used to seeing me like this after all. Read over these equations for me, will you, and tell me if you spot any errors.”

The idea had come to him the morning after his dream of flying, perhaps because having finally reached a conclusion as to his relationship with Young, he had at last freed up processing power for other things.

He had abandoned his work on the sarcophagus reluctantly - out here it was guaranteed that at any given moment someone might find themselves with life threatening injuries. The ship was old and components blew out all the time. Young might say all he liked that it wasn’t urgent right now but he would want it fixed yesterday as soon as someone got hurt.

But in his present state, Rush could not do everything at once. Put him back in his own body and he would work faster - probably make up the time lost within a couple of days. Besides, he wanted no more of trespassing in another man’s dreams. He would not take advantage even of an enemy in that way, and they were something less than enemies now, he hoped.

Plus, he wanted his brain back. Much had become clear after inhabiting Young’s body for some time. The man’s military strategy, for example. A great deal of what Rush had taken for indecisiveness and faltering - all those concessions and negotiations and delay - might actually have been deliberate efforts to slow things down, to give himself time to think.

Rush didn’t want to have to learn to do that for himself. He wanted his fire back. He wanted to stop feeling like mud and stones and start feeling like a hurricane again. And if perhaps he found it difficult to get motivated to do anything at all he had at least finally learned to tap into some of Young’s dogged persistence and do the fucking thing regardless.

“I can’t see anything wrong,” Chloe interrupted his thoughts, sounding doubtful. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Well, that depends very much on what you think it is, doesn’t it?”

Chloe wiped off a bulkhead and leaned there. Ever since her sojourn with the aliens her face could sometimes become unreadably blank as it was now, but he thought there was a trace of concern about it nevertheless.

“Something the matter?”

“You’re still very much yourself.” She cocked her head at him as if not sure what she saw. “You don’t seem as changed as the Colonel does.”

“Changed how?” he said sharply, finding he didn’t like that idea.

She lifted her chin as though he had confirmed a theorem of hers, and a small amused smile crept back onto her lips. “Well, he’s learning Ancient, for a start. I caught him the other night, sitting up late in the observation deck, reading children’s books in Ancient on a holographic console. I thought at first you must have fixed everything, and that it was you.”

That gave Rush a warm little feeling, curled up like a sleeping field mouse under the breastbone. He thought of saying, casually, “The man must have been through university to be where he is, it would be surprising if he didn’t study,” but the pleasure of seeming to know everything did not quite trump the pleasure of knowing something that no one else did and keeping it to himself.

Good for him, though. Rush was in agreement with his ancient Presbyterian upbringing on this point - when you’re given a talent, it is a sin not to use it. If Young had not taken advantage of being briefly gifted with a superior brain, Rush would have thought the worse of him.

“Hmph,” he said, “Well, it was about time.”

Chloe laughed. But then her gaze returned to the wall, and she sobered. “He’s never going to agree to this, you know.”

Rush scoffed. “If it’s the only solution, he’ll have to.”

“I mean, theoretically it _should_ work, but then that’s what everyone thought about Eli’s ‘dial home in a star’ solution and that... didn’t quite perform as advertised, did it?”

Rush had woken up that morning with some of the crushing weight removed from his back, feeling more like himself – more capable of changing the world, more like fighting than like giving in. But he could feel the continued presence of that weight, like a mound of stones suspended on thin pillars above his head. He was sickly afraid of the pillars giving way and the whole avalanche smacking him back into the ground as they fell. Chloe’s words were not helping.

“I can’t stay like this, Chloe.” The words came out in a growl that sounded angry to him, though he had been aiming for conviction with a touch of despair. “I can’t. It will work, and if it doesn’t - well, I’m willing to take that risk.”

She put her hand on his arm. Inman had discovered some dye plants on the last planet. Dried and mixed with fat it’s use had spread among the female members of the crew as lipstick and blusher. Rubbed into the fingernails it tinted them a pale red. Under alien influence, Chloe’s nails had been broken and chewed, now they were well shaped and rosy pink again, a sign of bravery in the face of an uncaring universe.

“But what if he isn’t?”

She had to be brave to say such things to him. There was the rub indeed, because why should Young agree to an untried procedure that might leave them both dead, or worse, brain damaged, when he could do nothing at all and continue to reap the benefit of Rush’s fine-tuned active mind and energetic body? Why on Destiny _would he_ give that back, given any excuse at all to keep it?

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

 

* * *

 

Now here he was, paused outside Young’s open door, nerving himself up to come to it.

He hadn’t seen Young since the realization that he didn’t know the man at all. In a manner of speaking, this would be the first time the two of them had ever truly met. He must not allow himself to fall back into incorrect habits of thought, but at the same time he must somehow contrive to spare himself the humiliation of letting Young know he had ever been wrong. It would do best to be as normal as possible and...

And lurking out here in the corridor was not that.

He rapped sharply on the door jamb, and walked in before Young had finished saying “Yes?”

Young was seated at his desk, wearing Rush’s glasses on Rush’s nose, cross-referencing something that looked tedious. When he saw who it was, he scrambled to his feet, stood as though he didn’t quite know what to do next. His smile was one Rush hadn’t seen before and found himself examining closely, trying to parse out its meaning. It was... _nice_? Open. _Hopeful_ , perhaps? A softer, more vulnerable expression than Rush imagined his face had ever worn, when it was in his own possession.

It occurred to him that he shouldn’t stare at about the same time that Young dropped his head with a rueful laugh. “I’m sorry. You looked... uh... There’s good news?”

All right. He was being normal, remember. Normal for a man with an incorrect conception of the universe. He was going to be normal, while not allowing himself to fall back on old habits. Yes, well that was going to be child’s play.

“I found a way to switch us back.” Thinking too much was inimical to performance. He would just come out with it and take things as they were. “But you’re not going to like it.”

Young seemed to relax at that. He took his glasses off and came out from behind his desk. Which - if it was supposed to put Rush at his ease, didn’t.

“I dislike your suggestions on principle Rush, you know that.”

He did know it. He was just surprised that-- Oh. Oh, it had been a joke. He produced a startled huff of laughter and Young looked at him like he’d grown a second head. Well, what was Young expecting him to do in response to a joke? Attack him? He’d never been that unreasonable, surely?

Dear God, this was awful. “It’s the chair,” he said, trying to get it all out at once, so he could go away as quickly as possible, and stop feeling rubbed raw and all on edges. “We upload our consciousnesses into Destiny and then we download them into the appropriate bodies.”

“Isn’t that--”

“I’ve worked out a number of safeguards to do with buffering speed, partitioning of Destiny’s memory, firewalling the interface and so forth to minimize any danger. Chloe has checked the maths. It should be no more dangerous than the time when I successfully uploaded and downloaded myself.”

Young was looking somewhat shell-shocked still. He perched on one of the arms of his sofa, and Rush had a weird flash of thinking what a dainty little bird-like creature he was... and that was … no, no, no. Absolutely not...

“You, uh... You almost died that time, Rush. We had to put two people in storage to get you back, and then you were in a coma for three days.”

“I got better.”

Young snorted. Rush found himself smiling in return. Well fancy that. So the Colonel was a Monty Python fan? The things you found out when you were looking for them. “But seriously, that happened because of an unexpected glitch in Mandy’s program. She had put a term in the parameters for download that the computer could not adequately define. That meant the parameters could not be met...”

Because although she thought she loved him, once she found out how he truly felt, who he truly was, it did not come up to her standards after all. How could he blame her for that? One of the reasons why Gloria was so uniquely wonderful was that no one else in the universe _could_ see Rush clearly and still love him. Mandy had tried very hard, but it simply wasn’t possible.

“And you’d be absolutely sure that wouldn’t happen again with your program?”

Rush looked up sharply. On edge as he was, he wasn’t entirely sure if his professional competence was being mocked, and although he was a pretty peaceable man on the whole, he wouldn’t stand for that.

But Young’s expression was almost gentle. Worried, he thought, not accusatory. Firmly he reminded himself to stop assuming he was being attacked. He opened his mouth to say “Yes, absolutely sure,” and shut it again to sigh.

 _If you are to be trusted, you must be trustworthy_ , he told himself again, which sounded about as much fun as a tonsillectomy, but… “Well, no. I can’t be certain that an unexpected glitch won’t arise. That is the nature of the unexpected.”

“So essentially, rather than having both of us here, maybe a bit amalgamated, but safe, they could lose us both.”

 _The man was such a..._ Rush stopped himself on ‘coward’ and rephrased to _the man was so fucking over-cautious._

 _That’s my body_ , he wanted to say. _I want my body back because it’s mine. I want you back in yours because it’s yours, and I want us to be us again, only better._ But he’d already offered as much honesty as he could force out of himself and that was too private to share. “I think it’s worth the risk.”

Young nodded, still looking at him as though there was something on his face that he didn’t expect to be there. Rush guessed he wasn’t carrying off the ‘normal’ thing too well.

“I’m going to have to think about it,” Young said, quiet, concerned... frankly a bit peculiar. What was _wrong_ with him?  “Camile is on Earth right now, politicking with the IOA on your behalf. She says we’ve got about a week before the hearing, so I’ll give you an answer in a couple of days.”

“You can’t keep me like this against my will.” For all Rush’s determination to be conciliatory, it came out snippy and challenging as ever.

But Young just looked reassured. “You...”

 _Yes, yes,_ Rush thought, suppressing a desire to roll his eyes. _Just say it and have done: “You should have thought of that before you did it to me.”_

If that had been what Young had been about to say, however, he stopped himself. Started again more carefully. “You can’t risk my life against my will, Rush. So... give me some time to think about it. In the mean time see if you can come up with a better option that doesn’t potentially end up killing us, okay?”

It wasn’t okay - he wanted this done now, right now, this very instant. But he also wanted to try to make this work between them. To that end he could grudgingly say “I suppose it will have to be.”

 

* * *

 

“We really sure about this?” whispered Mackie as the group turned into the long crossways corridor where Rush had his solitary quarters.

“You telling me you’re not?” Baras stopped to massage his right arm, where he said the breaks little Chloe had given him had never stopped aching since stasis.

Dunning slapped the nearest door open, beckoned them all into the dirt and desolation of an empty set of rooms. He wasn’t quite sure what it was that made the occupied ones feel different, but they got - they just got more human after a while. “Listen, if we’re gonna jaw, we should get into cover.”

They followed him in, Mackie still looking skittish, Baras grim, and Graham practically dancing on the balls of his feet with eagerness.

“What’s your problem?” Baras rounded on Mackie as soon as the door was closed. “You were keen enough in the mess.”

“I just,” Mackie smoothed down his buzz cut and shifted his weight from foot to foot like the child he was. “I just would feel better if we had orders.”

“Yeah, well we never will have, that’s the point.”

“You saw him in the mess,” Graham sneered. “Wearing the Colonel’s body like it belonged to him. He’s had this coming for _years_. We should have taken him out before it got to this. When he stranded us here. When he mutinied. When he let Riley die - Dunning, he was on that shuttle. He could’a died too, all cos Rush thought their lives were his to risk.”

That was true enough and Dunning - well he did kind of resent it, no lie. He didn’t resent it as much as Graham resented Rush showing him up over Dannic, mind. The Lucian Alliance psycho had walked through Graham like Graham was wet paper, and Graham couldn’t forgive Rush for being the one to bring him down instead.

“The point is,” Baras stretched his arm across his chest, loosening it, “that Rush has been trying to take over this ship from day one. Now you can’t fucking tell who’s in what body. You can’t tell if it’s Rush acting like Young or Young acting like Rush, and until you can tell, I’m not taking orders from either of them. I’m not saying hurt him serious. I’m saying we put him in the infirmary for long enough to get this mess sorted. I’m saying we put him down so people we _do_ trust can put things right. And if that means paying him some of his just desserts, I got no problem with that.”

Mackie nodded slowly, his shoulders relaxing into parade rest. He was a sweet kid, really, but this was no business for the sweet.

“Dunning? What do you think?”

He’d been mulling over this a long time and he could feel it in his guts, but it was hard to put into words. “I hate things that get under your skin and take you over,” he said. “And the snakes, the snakes aren’t the only thing that do.”

He’d been about Mackie’s age, on one of Jackson’s mad expeditions to talk to the Unas. Him and his mates, they’d gone down to the lake to get water and the next thing he knew something long and wriggling, serpentine, had flown out of the water and was boring its way down Joe Baxter’s throat in a spray of blood and bubbles. Joe’d been screaming and scrabbling at his neck, and they’d tried to dig it out. They’d tried to _dig it out_. Fuck!

He squeezed his eyes closed on that image, rubbed the slippery feeling off his hands, tried to refocus on the present and couldn’t quite make it. Because yeah, then there’d been Sue Kaplan - Major Sue Kaplan, ma’am to you - and he’d put her quietness on the way home down to having seen her buddy eviscerated in front of her eyes. Only when they’d got through the gate did he see her eyes flash eerie silver white and realize the fucking snakes had got her too.

She’d snapped the neck of one of the gate techs in one hand and started to dial something before he had got himself together enough to choke back his tears and aim and… Yeah, anyway. And then he’d gone to tell her mom, because he had been her friend.

Ever since… ever since then he’d known better than to take for granted that the person you thought you knew wasn’t harboring some kind of alien parasite. Wasn’t secretly something else, something evil, on the inside.

“Best case scenario like Baras says - Rush is trying to take over the ship by stealing the Colonel’s body. He deserves a smackdown for that alone. But what if, what if it’s not even just them in there? What if those stones… when he tampered with them, he let something out?”

Mackie rocked back on his heels and gave Dunning a ‘stop bullshitting me’ look that faltered into dismay when it became clear that Dunning wasn’t.

“That’s wacko man. You serious?”

“I don’t mean this time,” Dunning clarified. “Not exactly. I mean the time something came out of them and took over little Chloe Armstrong, and it was choking her. Yeah, I know it said - people thought - it was those two dead girls, but they were _dead_ , right? You know what you get when you summon up dead people.”

“You get a bloody assortment of things on this ship,” Baras muttered, but he still looked like the wheels were turning inside. No one wanted to say the word ‘demons’ out loud - you sounded like a whack-job if you did, but you didn’t have to, did you? People understood. Maybe he wouldn’t even go that far himself, but the lines between gods and demons, Ancient consciousnesses and parasites got pretty blurred out here, and no one could deny there was something freaky going on.

“So it half chokes Chloe, right? Persuades Rush to upload himself for a bit of quality time. Next thing we know, Eli’s fighting to contain it, Rush is in a coma, and what I say is that we don’t know what came back.”

He could see all three of them connecting dots they’d never thought to put together before, adding this to whatever grudges they already carried. Maybe not being wholly convinced but finding it horribly plausible regardless.

“I’m not saying you have to believe me,” he offered. “I’m just saying I hate things that take over people’s bodies without asking, whether that’s Goa’uld, or something out of the stones, or just plain Rush on his own. That’s what the SGC was set up to stop, so I’m gonna stop it. You got your own reasons, I’m sure. And I got mine.”

They stood watching one another for a moment, and as they did Dunning felt the vibrations of approaching footsteps along the metal deck. Something less than a sound, more like the faint tiptoe warning the spider gets when the fly sets a foot in its web.

“He’s on his way. You better decide soon, son. You in or are you out?”

Mackie looked to Baras and to Graham. Graham was grinning, Baras too. “It’s Rush,” he said, “what more d’you need?”

Mackie caught their spark, lit up, laughing, just as the footsteps passed the door. If they piled out now, they would be between Rush and any exit. He would have to go through them to get away.

“Okay,” Mackie nodded, sharp and focused like, hearing the beat of his quarry, “I’m in.”

Oh yeah, Rush was in for it now.


	15. Chapter 15

Young did not stir from his spot on the arm of the couch for several minutes after Rush had left. Instead, he stared at his closed bedroom door and tried to puzzle out what exactly had just happened. Because whatever that had been, it sure as hell hadn’t been one of their typical verbal sparring matches. In spite of the fact that Rush had walked away unhappy, their conversation had been almost...  _ friendly. _ Rush had not been antagonistic or contemptuous, and he had even made an obvious effort to rein in his impatience. And, wonder of wonders, he had laughed at Young’s mild joke, and then he had even made one himself. What the hell was going on in that man’s head? What had changed?

_ He’s finally got you figured out _ , said a cynical voice in his brain.  _ More flies with honey, and all that. _

Possibly. Rush could put on a bit of charm when he wanted something from someone. His smiling obsequiousness around Senator Armstrong came to mind. On second thought, that hadn’t been charming. That had just been embarrassing. 

Either way, Rush hadn’t been charming just now. Or if Young, besotted as he apparently was, had found him so, that probably had not been Rush’s intention. He had seemed earnest, awkward, and very uncomfortable. He certainly wanted something from Young, but he had come to ask for it openly. He’d even been honest about the potential for unforeseen problems with his solution. He had not waved aside the risks, and he had not treated Young like a brainless idiot. And when Rush had finally lost his grip on his patience and had snapped at Young, it had come out as an emotional appeal, not an insult.

_ ‘You can’t keep me like this against my will _ .’

Young’s first reaction to those words had been irritation. This situation was primarily Rush’s fault in the first place. Why was it suddenly Young’s duty to risk his life just to make Rush’s life easier? But now all he felt was sympathy. He had somehow gotten the better end of this bad bargain. He had lost a little height and muscle tone and had gained a few gray hairs, but he had also gained a powerful brain and an almost inexhaustible store of energy. Rush, on the other hand, had inherited Young’s black moods, slower brain, and the weariness that had always seemed to hang from his very bones like leaden weights. Of  _ course _ Rush wanted his body back. 

If only his proposed fix didn’t involve the chair. Why was it  _ always _ the chair with Rush? The very thought of sitting in that thing made Young’s skin crawl. And the thought of having his consciousness uploaded to Destiny made his palms sweat and his pulse flutter. Adjusting to someone else’s brain chemistry had been hard enough. What would it feel like to be inside a computer? What if he got stuck there? Would he be like Ginn and Amanda Perry before quarantine, able to interact with the crew? Or would he just be lost somewhere amidst all that data, his conscious mind disintegrating, his sense of self destroyed? Would he simply die?

Rush had mentioned that something had gone wrong with Doctor Perry’s program. What had he said, exactly? Oh yes, that she had included a term in her program that the computer couldn’t define. Young had only the vaguest notion of what that meant, but his mind latched onto the idea anyway. Just one term. One tiny oversight, and Rush had nearly died. Clearly, there was no room for error. And even Rush had admitted that another glitch was possible.

Young sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, disturbing the neat ponytail that rarely lasted more than a few hours anyway. What he needed was more information. How was he supposed to make a decision based on so little data?

He had sent Rush away too soon. 

He rose and crossed to his desk, where he had left his radio. But as he reached for it, he hesitated. He wasn’t sure Rush was actually carrying a radio at the moment, and besides, ordering Rush back to his room would introduce the wrong note into their conversation before it even started. Young didn’t want an official briefing between lead scientist and expedition commander. An honest talk between two shipmates stuck in the same awkward situation, that’s what he was going for. He would do Rush the courtesy of seeking him out in person.

There were any number of places Rush could have gone, but Young decided to check his quarters first. Rush had looked tired, and given the evidence of the chalk dust in his hair, he had probably come to Young straight after working out his solution involving the chair. His next stop, therefore, was likely to be his own quarters, or possibly the nearest shower room. And, well… Young wasn’t going to look for him in the showers. In fact, Young was going to put the thought of Rush in the shower firmly out of his head immediately.

He was about to turn onto Rush’s hall when he heard angry, raised voices. Young stopped abruptly, listening, but the words were indistinct. He recognized Corporal Baras’s voice first. It was loud and grating and belligerent. Airman Dunning’s voice was tighter, grimmer. And then Rush spoke, and his voice - Young’s voice - was a low, dark, reverberating thrum, full of barely-contained fury. 

Shit.  _ Shit _ . 

Young rounded the corner to see Rush cornered against the door to his quarters. Baras stood on Rush’s immediate left, blocking access to the door control. Dunning and Graham had positioned themselves in front of him, and Mackie, looking vaguely uncomfortable, was on his right. Rush was alone and boxed in, lips drawn back in a fierce snarl. 

“Someone want to tell me what’s going on here?” Young asked as he approached the group. He felt this body’s jittery anger rising and threatening to take him over, but he repressed it. He definitely could not afford to start visibly trembling in front of his men. 

The look Dunning shot at him nearly stopped him in his tracks. It was so full of disgust and loathing and fear that it stole the breath right out of Young’s lungs. He’d been on the receiving end of more than his fair share of dirty looks in his life, but no one had ever,  _ ever _ looked at him like that. He glanced down at himself, wondering if his skin had gone spontaneously blue and alien without his noticing. But no, he still looked like Rush.

Young lifted his eyes and met Dunning’s gaze squarely. “Want to answer my question, Airman?” he said.

A slight movement from Rush drew his attention. Rush’s expression was hard to decipher. Young had expected to see relief, but what he got was something closer to a warning.

“This is bullshit,” Baras muttered. “Dunning, if you’re not gonna do something, I am.”

Young could feel the tension like the creeping of spiders across his skin. It occurred to him suddenly that he had badly miscalculated this situation. He should have called for backup before he even stepped into the hall. But three weeks ago, it would have been different. One sentence from him, and these soldiers would have fallen into line. They would have recognized his authority. They would have shown him the respect that their commanding officer deserved.

But this wasn’t three weeks ago. This was today, and he was wearing Rush’s skin, and he’d been doing scary things like teaching himself Ancient and trying to learn about the ship’s systems, and apparently that was enough to completely derail the military’s confidence in him.

Young experienced a sudden flash of sympathy for Rush’s demonstrative disdain for ordinary mortals. What a bunch of fucking idiots.

Irritated and ready to start whatever ill-advised brawl was about to go down, Young grasped Dunning’s forearm and wrenched him off-balance so that he tottered a few steps away from Rush. “Back. Off. That’s an  _ order _ ,” he gritted out.

Dunning tore away from his grip as if Young’s fingers had scorched him. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” he shouted almost hysterically.

The first blow didn’t come from Dunning. It was Graham who moved in with a solid box to Young’s left ear. Young saw stars and his head shrieked in protest, but he reacted fast. He spun on his heel, ducked a second swipe, and managed to get in a quick jab to Graham’s midsection. Then Dunning closed in from the front and Mackie from behind, and Young found himself slammed up against the door to Rush’s quarters. The back of his head hit the door, adding to his sense of disorientation.

This was completely different from his last fight with Rush. All the advantages of speed, quick thinking, and good technique couldn’t help him against three larger, trained opponents. Four, if he counted Baras, who he could hear scuffling with Rush somewhere to his left. Right now, Young was small and lightweight and could be tossed around like a ragdoll. He wasn’t going to be walking away from this one. This was going to fucking  _ hurt _ .

He rolled away from Graham’s next punch - Graham telegraphed his blows a bit too much; he’d have to work on that - but doubled over as Dunning planted his fist squarely into Young’s gut. A second later, a kick from Mackie connected with Young’s right knee, and he started to go down.

_ Shit, shit, shit _ . This was the playground dream all over again. This was Tom and the vultures and dirt under his fingernails and an endless rain of blows upon his back. His terror was a bonfire in his mind. It was water filling up his lungs. It was electricity under his skin, making him shake. 

But just before he hit the floor, a strong hand closed around his left bicep, and he was hauled back against a solid chest. For an instant he remained sheltered by the stocky frame that curled protectively around him. It was a brief reprieve, but it was enough time for Young to get both legs back under him. There was no time to look up, to meet Rush’s eyes, to express his gratitude, but Young suspected that Rush hadn’t done it for him, anyway. Most likely Rush had been thinking of that younger version of himself - that brainy child who had had no defense against the bullies in his life. It didn’t matter. Young’s fear had passed. His head was ringing and his body ached, but he was ready to get back into the action.

Fighting shoulder to shoulder, their backs to the door, Young and Rush fared a little better against their attackers. They moved in tandem as if they had trained for this, and maybe they had. Maybe all their previous fights had just been practice for this moment, teaching them each others’ strengths and weaknesses so they could compensate as needed. But for all that, they were each taking a beating. Neither of them could keep this up for long.

Just when things were looking dire - when Young realized that the next blow he took would be the one that knocked him on his ass - a voice rang out, loud and clear and authoritative, bringing the fight to an abrupt halt.

“What in the  _ hell _ is this?” Greer shouted from the end of the hall.

Young sagged back against the door. Oh thank  _ fuck _ .

Their four assailants had turned around to face Greer, giving Rush and Young a much-needed moment to assess their collective hurts. Young brushed his hair out of his eyes and used the back of his hand to wipe blood away from his split lip. Rush shifted beside him, knocking their shoulders together. Young glanced over curiously and saw that Rush was now slightly favoring his left leg. He also had a bruise just beginning to blossom on his left cheek, and there were angry red patches on his neck. Someone, probably Baras, had gotten his hands around Rush’s throat. Young experienced another flash of anger at the thought.

Still, Young had clearly suffered the most damage. His knee was swelling up, his entire torso felt like one big bruise, his head was pounding, and he wasn’t sure whether his nausea was the result of smacking his head against the door or getting punched in the gut. He wanted nothing more than to just slide down to the floor and never get up again.

“Colonel?” Greer’s voice snapped him out of his reflections. The Master Sergeant had shoved his way into the group, weapon in hand, filling up the space with his menacing presence. He stared grimly at Young. “All right?”

Young just nodded. He was standing by his own power - well, kind of; the door was helping - and he was conscious, so that must mean he was fine.

“How do you even know that’s the Colonel?” Dunning demanded. “It could be anyone or anything and you wouldn’t  _ know _ .”

Greer slowly turned his head to fix Dunning with an icy stare. “I know the Colonel,” he said, emphasizing each word.

Young smiled wearily at that. He could always count on Greer.

“He hasn’t been acting like Colonel Young,” Baras said. It came out as a whine, but that might have had something to do with the fact that his nose was bleeding copiously.  _ Nice hit, Rush. _

“He’s turning into Rush,” Graham put in. “You musta seen it. Being in Rush’s body is fucking him up, man. There’s no Colonel left.”

Mackie just stood slightly off to one side and looked like he’d like to disappear into the nearest wall. Young almost felt sorry for him.

“I see,” Greer said, looking around at the four of them. He nodded slowly, and the smile on his face was far from pleasant. “I got it. So you just thought you’d beat the shit outta both of ‘em, just to make sure you’d got all your bases covered. Nice. Efficient of you.”

“Not both of them,” Mackie finally spoke up. “We just wanted Rush. We weren’t expecting the Colonel to…” He trailed off, dismayed to find his three co-conspirators scowling at him. “I mean, I don’t know which is which either. But you said…” He blinked and shut his mouth, apparently giving up on trying to explain himself.

Young straightened, drawing Greer’s attention. Greer swept a cool, assessing gaze over Young, then met his eyes. There was complete confidence in that look, and Young felt warmed by it. 

“Orders, sir?” Greer asked with just the right amount of diffidence.

“Put them in lock-up. Let them cool off for a while.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Sergent? Better separate them.”

“Yes, sir,” Greer repeated. “All right, shitheads. Move!”

Greer was just beginning to herd the four soldiers down the hall when Camile appeared around the corner, looking concerned and slightly breathless. “What happened?” she demanded, looking over the retreating soldiers briefly before turning her attention to Rush and Young. Her eyes widened when she saw the state they were both in. “Walters just came to tell me it sounded like World War III down here.”

“Walters has been known to exaggerate slightly,” Rush said dryly. He pushed himself away from the door and began absently straightening his - Young’s - uniform. “The situation is resolved.” He managed to look awfully untroubled for someone who had been in obvious pain just moments ago.

Camile looked at Young, who still hadn’t moved because frankly, he wasn’t sure he could put his full weight on his right knee without it buckling under him. He huffed out a sigh and ran his fingers through his hair. “Some of the military personnel don’t seem to have much confidence in my command anymore,” he said. Rush shot an odd look in his direction, but Young ignored him. “They think I’m turning into Rush. Or I am Rush. Or possibly neither of us are Rush and we’re something else entirely. They didn’t seem to be able to make up their minds about that.”

Camile did not seem particularly surprised. So she’d heard the rumors too, then. “They attacked you?” she asked.

“O _ bviously _ they attacked us,” Rush said testily. 

“Yes,” said Young, meeting Camile’s eyes steadily. He could practically hear the wheels turning in her head, and he knew what she was going to say next. He wished she wouldn’t actually say it out loud. That would make it too real. But it would be true either way. 

Camile folded her arms across her chest and heaved a sigh. “Look, Colonel,” she said, and her tone was very gentle, “I haven’t said anything before now because it looked like you had things under control. Sure, things have been… strained. People have been talking. But I was hoping everyone would get used to the changes.”

Young wiped at his lip again, which was still bleeding steadily. “Yeah,” he said, because there wasn’t much else he could say. He’d been hoping the same thing. In fact, he’d foolishly thought everyone else would adjust at the same rate that he did. But they weren’t in his head; they didn’t know that deep down, at his very core, he was still himself. He was a little changed, both in appearance and mentality, but he was still Young. He was still dedicated to his job, still intent on taking care of this ill-assorted band of accidental spacefarers. 

They couldn’t see that, though. Rush was the only person on Destiny who had a frame of reference to understand what had happened to Young.

Camile was speaking again, and even though he could predict every word, he made himself pay attention. “In light of what just happened, I think you know… well, this situation is not tenable.” She sounded regretful. Not a hint of triumph in her tone. “We can’t risk this happening again. We face too many dangers out here. We need strong, effective leadership.”

“Yes, we do,” he agreed.

“If the military won’t follow you--”

“Then I have to step down. I know.”

They regarded each other calmly. Out of the corner of his eye, Young could see Rush standing very still. Watchful. Young wondered what was going through his mind. He had been trying to remove Young from command since they had first arrived on this ship. Now he was finally getting his wish. He ought to be pleased.

He didn’t seem particularly pleased about it. He just looked… contemplative.

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” Camile said finally, drawing his full focus back to her. And she really did look sorry.

“I just have one request,” Young told her. “Work closely with Lieutenant Scott. You’ll get more cooperation from the military personnel that way.”

Camile nodded. She seemed relieved that he was taking this seriously. What had she expected him to do? Carry on like nothing had happened? Blithely go about his business until the next time his soldiers attacked him or ignored his orders? Wait until someone  _ really _ got hurt, or worse? 

“I’ll do that,” she said. “In fact I’ll… I should probably talk to him now. Unless you’d rather--”

“No,” Young said, “go ahead. Rush and I have some things to discuss.”

Camile ran her eyes over both of them again, looking doubtful. “What you two really ought to do is go to the infirmary,” she said.

Somehow that idea failed to appeal to Young  _ at all _ . “We’re fine,” he said firmly.

“Well… suit yourselves then,” she said. Her concern was evident, but so was her impatience to be gone. The situation was… awkward. There were too many bad memories attached to leadership exchanges between them. Young didn’t blame her when, after a moment of hesitation, she walked away.

Rush was still at Young’s side, eyeing the spot where Camile had been standing a moment earlier. His expression didn’t shed any light on his thoughts.

“Come on,” Young sighed. He took a few steps, and yep, his right knee hurt like a son of a bitch. He hopped forward a step, then reached out to brace himself against Rush’s shoulder. 

Rush raised a hand to steady him. “And where are we going?”

“My room.”

“Why? Mine is right here.”

Young laughed breathlessly. “Because I have the good drugs,” he said. “And we’re each going to take a liberal dose. Right now, I think I deserve a mental vacation.”


	16. Chapter 16

What bizarre things emotions were anyway, Rush thought, as they threaded a faltering way around the outskirts of the inhabited section, through corridors of whose existence he suspected only he was aware. It was a longer route, but it should ensure they were not seen, and that seemed important right now.

Young leaned heavily against his arm, his breath hitching with every other footstep. Rush couldn’t see his face - his head was bent and angled away from Rush, his long hair swept forward and concealed everything but the bright stripe of blood that oozed over his chin and dripped to the deck as they passed.

Rush was fairly sure he wasn’t supposed to be feeling joy. It was cold of him, he was certain. He should not be feeling this round, warm, aching, swelling up of disbelieving happiness, so strong it made him want to weep.

But God, all the times he’d been in that same situation before - on the playground, on street corners around Glasgow when the lads from the dockyard caught him coming out of college with his arms full of books - all those times and he’d never once had someone to stand by him. As it turned out, it was a totally different experience when you had a friend fighting in your corner. He didn’t even know whether they’d won or lost, but what he felt was triumph. Triumph and anguish mixed, because this joy was such a wrong shape for his soul that it almost hurt to contain it.

They reached Young’s quarters in silence, and that was fine because he was preoccupied with this new sensation, with trying to contain and trample on the rampant hopes that seemed to be shooting off from it in every direction. He mustn’t read too much into it or imagine that this was in any way personal - Young almost certainly still despised him, and would have done the same for any member of his crew.

But to even be considered a member of the crew... that was a step up. Having been outside, having been starving for a long time, even being allowed a place by the fire was...

His earlier self snarled at him, because he had been offered that a long time ago and turned it down as a matter of pride and principle. But his earlier self had been a wanker and could bloody well shut up and let him be happy for once. Gloria - Destiny - had been right about that.

He hit the door release on Young’s quarters and considered. Getting to the sofa behind the coffee table looked complicated - too many abrupt turns for a lurching pair with one bad leg each. So he maneuvered them both over to the bed and helped Young ease himself down there.

Young finally looked up as if to say something, but he met Rush’s eye and whatever he saw there made him wince and duck his head again in silence. He wiped his chin, smearing blood over his hand and cheek, and heaved a deep sigh.

A few moments later he said, “The drug’s over there on the counter. One of TJ’s little pots. Canteen’s there too. Mix a pinch with half a cup of water for the pain. More if you want to forget everything. You can bring me the pot.”

It occurred to Rush, perhaps a little late, that Young on the other hand was _not_ happy. That hunched forward, curled in posture was definitely indicative of defeat, and he had a strong impression - though he couldn’t have said quite from where it arose - that Young was only refraining from hugging himself because he was being watched.

In fact... He picked up water and medicine, headed back to stand over Young’s sullen form. In fact he would probably go so far as to say that Young was miserable.

That was at least partially Rush’s fault... He caught that thought before it could sour his mood. No, no, it wasn’t his fault at all, it was the fault of those morons who were once Young’s men. But just because it wasn’t Rush’s fault didn’t mean he was insensible to a fellow creature’s suffering. He set aside his own pleasure to be examined more thoroughly at a later date, and hunkered down in front of Young, his fingertips just resting on, barely touching, the coarse fabric over Young’s good knee.

“Do you know what your problem is?” he said, as gently as he could.

Young raised his head, which was what Rush had been aiming for, pleased to see indignation replace apathy in the man’s eyes.

“Your problem is that when people hand you stones, you try to swallow them. They don’t deserve that. You should take those stones and use them to break the bastards’ windows. Tell them to fuck off. That’s what I’d do.”

“I have no idea what the hell you just said, Rush,” Young managed the gleam of a puzzled smile, still with a beaten softness that Rush didn’t like. “But thanks, I guess.”

“Odd. I would have sworn that was a recurring dream, but...” Rush opened the pot of herbal powder and measured a meager dose into the palm of his hand, which he licked up undiluted. His throat was sore and his shin throbbed, there were bruises along his ribs and his knuckles had split against Mackie’s teeth, and he felt he would think better with all of that quietened down, but it wasn’t worth the full dose, and he was certainly not taking more.

“Nine times out of ten I don’t remember my dreams.”

“You’re not missing anything, I assure you.” Rush measured out a single dose for Young, mixed it in water and passed it over. Then he recapped the pot and put it back in its place on the shelf.

“Yeah, yours... yours haven’t been much of a picnic either.” Young tossed back the medicine and handed the cup back, looking at the distant shelf with a perfectly straight face that somehow still managed to give an impression of yearning. “I thought we were living it up a little. I’m a free man now, after all.”

Well, it wasn’t news to Rush that they both had their self-destructive tendencies. What was new was the knowledge that he could pity that, that he could see it not as a moral failing but as a reaching out for comfort when all other sources of comfort have been denied.

What Young didn’t know was that all other sources of solace had _not_ been exhausted. Just as Rush had not had someone to stand by him in years, he had also not had anyone to comfort for a very long while. There was perhaps not a lot of tenderness in him, but his stock of it must have piled up over all that time with no one to spend it on.

He poured a centimeter of water into the bottom of the cup and dipped his handkerchief into it, shuffled closer so he could take Young by the chin and lift his face into the light. Young stiffened briefly with surprise and then let him.

The split lip seemed to be clotting, finally, so Rush just cleaned around it, long swipes with the cool water over cheek and chin, lapping the worst of the gore off. They were both a little stiff, prepared to be offended, when he began, but by the time it ended Young was leaning into his hands, eyes closed. Some of the grayness had lifted from his face as he relaxed.

Rush was sorry to finish. “I don’t want to take anything that will dull the edge of this brain,” he murmured. “It’s hard enough to work with as it is. I don’t know how you manage.”

“Lots of patience,” Young opened an eye and smiled up at him. “You sure? I mean neither of us is in charge any more. You finally got what you wanted. Why not celebrate?”

It had not occurred to Rush that his baldly speaking the truth might have hurt Young’s feelings. In fact before this experience it had not occurred to him that Young had any feelings at all, other than anger and irritation. He squashed an incipient feeling of guilt partly because he didn’t want to feel it and partly because it was useless. The past was the past and could not be altered by regret or anything else. But the future? The future was always malleable to those who dared try.

“And waste all the effort we’ve put into this partnership over the years? I don’t think so. No, no.” Rush stood up, making Young have to straighten up too if he was to continue looking him in the face. “No. Colonel,” he deliberately repeated his words from the incident when they thought they would be burned up in a star. “I think now would be a good moment for you to trust me to fix this.”

They had done so well, during that time. They had been so peaceful together, it had almost been a shame to live past it, to have to pick up again a conflict that he now realized had been ill advised all along. Perhaps the reminder would reconcile Young to the risk they must take now.

Young let the memories settle around them before he asked, “Fix it with the chair, you mean?”

“Yes.”

With a huff of humorless laughter, Young bowed his head into his hands. “Okay. Okay, yeah. Let’s do it. What have I got left to lose?”

Rush understood perfectly why people thought he was inhumanly cold at times, because that just made him happy too. He would run the maths past Eli to be on the safe side. Calibrating the chair would take four hours. Three if he pushed it - but he would not push it because he was going to be thorough and cautious. In fact in this body, six hours would probably be closer. And then, whatever happened, it would be better than this.

He paused at the door, seized by the desire to say something about how much it meant to him that Young had got himself beaten up in his defense, to try to say “We’re in this together now” in a way that indicated that he really meant it this time.

“Young?”

“Yeah?”

But Young looked like his whole life was a bruise, and Rush had no way of talking about these things that didn’t involve defining his terms by symbolic names and expressing his meaning in formulae. They looked helplessly at each other for a moment and then Rush gave up.

“Thank you.”

He closed the door behind him as he left.

 

* * *

 

Young stared at the ceiling and contemplated the fact that, for the second time in one day, Rush’s altered behavior toward him had left him completely - but rather pleasantly - bewildered. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could still feel the tender touch of Rush’s dampened handkerchief across his cheek. He treasured up the memory, his breath catching again at the phantom sensation of fingers supporting his chin and cool water cleansing his skin. He had been startled at first, but he had quickly realized the strange and wonderful gift he was being offered, and then he had simply enjoyed it. When Rush had withdrawn, his task complete, Young had experienced a little stabbing pang of disappointment. He could have lain there for hours, drinking in the exquisite comfort of being cared for by the person who held his happiness in surprisingly gentle hands.

Young sighed deeply and opened his eyes. The dark, suffocating reality of defeat had gradually given way to a cool, crystalline state of acceptance and peace. The medication probably had something to do with that, but it wasn’t the only thing influencing his state of mind. After all, Rush hadn’t let him have more than a normal dose. Young smiled ruefully and glanced at the shelf where the bottle sat temptingly. There was nothing stopping him from taking another dose or three, aside from the fact that he was somewhat comfortable at the moment and didn’t feel like trying to walk unassisted. If he had been in one of his dark moods, that excuse would have been insufficient to keep him away from the promise of temporary relief from his torments. But he wasn’t that desperate, and as strange as it was to admit it, he didn’t want to disappoint Rush.

Rush wanted Young to trust him. He hadn’t rejoiced over the fact that Young had finally been unseated from power. No, Rush apparently wanted to fix this situation - not just for his own sake, but for Young’s, too. And while Rush was good at breaking things - rules, promises, communication stones - he was pretty damn good at fixing things too. Young had entrusted his life to Rush on many past occasions and here he was, still drawing breath. He would do so again now, for the sake of that ‘partnership’ that Rush had mentioned so casually, as if he had no idea what the sound of that word on his lips would do to Young. As if he didn’t realize that Young’s heart would leap at the very thought that something more than bare tolerance lay between them.

_Are we partners, Rush? After all this time, after all of our conflicts, after all the blows dealt and blood drawn between us, can I think of you as a friend?_

The sad truth was that Rush probably could have gotten Young to agree to _anything_ after luring him with the promise of companionship. And possibly that had been his intention all along, but Young didn’t really think so. Rush was just not that good an actor. He hadn’t gone through all the motions of assisting Young to his room, preparing his medicine, washing his face, all with such tenderness that it made Young’s heart ache to remember it, as some sort of insidious stratagem to win Young over to his point of view. No, no. Rush only _wished_ he had that kind of finesse. Young knew him better than that.

So it must have been real. Rush had really been trying to comfort him and restore his hope.

Well, he had succeeded.

Maybe Rush’s dreams were responsible for his new sympathetic attitude toward Young. After all, Young’s dreams had given him some extremely personal, revealing information about Rush. What had Rush learned about Young? Something involving stones, evidently. How apt. It was stones that had gotten them into this mess in the first place.

Young sighed again, but then he smiled. He felt like he had just stepped into a parallel world where familiar objects bore different names and his eyes had to adjust to an altered color spectrum lit by an alien sun. All points of reference were displaced. Everything old was new and strange. But oh, how beautiful it all was.

He drifted off to sleep and dreamed of coffee and calculations and California sunrises, and the smile never left his lips.


	17. Chapter 17

The chair interface room had clearly not been designed to contain this many people, TJ reflected as she looked around. Brody, Eli, and Chloe appeared to be performing some kind of intricate musical chairs routine as they collectively manned the control panels at the back of the chair. Greer and Becker were on stand-by to do the heavy lifting; Greer had demanded to be involved in the process, and Becker had been hand-chosen by Scott for his loyalty to Young and his easygoing tolerance of Rush. James was on guard by the door, looking  pissed off and ready for someone to just _try_ and make another move on the Colonel. Young, still in Rush’s body, stood at TJ’s side.

And in the chair was Young’s body.

TJ couldn’t quite suppress her twinge of discomfort at the sight. His face looked pale and sickly in the blue-toned spotlight, and his body was slack and lifeless, vacated by Rush’s consciousness. Her medical training told her that any coma not intentionally induced by anesthesia was a Bad Thing, but her training hadn’t taken Ancient technology into account. There was no cause for alarm yet. Everything was progressing according to Rush’s plan.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find the Colonel smiling at her. He looked as though he understood exactly what was going through her mind. If he was nervous about all of this, he didn’t show it. But then, he never really did.

He was looking very much the worse for wear today. His lower lip was swollen, both his hands were bruised and scuffed, and he was once again using his G36 as a makeshift crutch. She suspected that there was a lot more damage hidden under his uniform, but he had refused to submit to a proper examination. Well, she could bide her time. As soon as Rush and Young came out of the chair, their first stop was going to be the infirmary, regardless of whether they were conscious enough to protest.

“Okay,” Eli said from behind one of the control panels, “Rush’s upload is complete. We can pull the Colonel’s body out right…”

The chair’s bolts and restraints disengaged.

“...now.”

Greer and Becker stepped forward. TJ watched as they lifted Young’s body from the chair and laid him out on a mattress brought in from the infirmary. At her side, Young shifted slightly. Uncomfortable at the sight of his own body in that state, perhaps?

No, apparently not. When she glanced at him, she found him staring at Eli instead.

“Rush is okay?” he asked quietly.

Eli looked up from the control panel. “Uh, yeah. Everything looks good,” he said. “You’re up, whenever you’re ready.”

Young nodded and limped toward the chair.

“But I should probably warn you…” Eli started, then let his voice trail off.

Young stopped abruptly. “Yes?” he snapped.

Ah. So he was nervous. The Colonel never got scared, not outwardly. He just got irritated.

Eli responded to Young’s sharp tone by raising both hands. “No, it’s nothing dangerous. It’s just that this is going to be different from the last time Rush uploaded himself to Destiny.”

“I certainly hope so,” Young said dryly.

“Heh, yeah, but that’s not what I mean,” Eli said. “The thing is, this is going to work a lot like it did with Ginn and Doctor Perry. You know, because you’re going to be completely untethered from your bodies for a while.”

“So?”

“So your minds will basically become part of Destiny, at least until we can download you again. I remember Ginn…” he paused, swallowed, and then continued in an admirably steady voice. “She always seemed to know what Doctor Perry was up to in Destiny’s systems. She could even tell what Doctor Perry was feeling at any given moment. It was as if their consciousnesses were overlapping a bit.” Eli shrugged. “I’m just saying, you might not get a lot of privacy in there.”

From the doorway, James caught TJ’s eye and raised both brows in exaggerated alarm. TJ shook her head minutely in response. No need to worry. The Colonel could handle Rush.

Young took a few seconds to absorb this information. Then he ducked his head and laughed softly. “Eli, there hasn’t been a whole lot of privacy for either of us in the past few weeks. I think we’ll manage.”

 _We’ll manage._ ‘We,’ not ‘I.’ As if it hadn’t even crossed his mind that Rush might take advantage of the situation. As if the two of them were a team and this was just one more obstacle they had to face together. Something had dramatically changed between them recently, that much was clear.

“O-okay,” said Eli, and he sounded as nonplussed as TJ felt. “That’s good. Just... wanted you to know.”

“Thank you,” said Young, still smiling faintly. He hobbled the last few steps to the chair, handed his gun off to TJ, and sat down. “Okay,” he said as he leaned back and placed his arms on the armrests. “I’m ready.”

“Starting the upload now,” Brody said.

Young met TJ’s eyes and his smile widened. _It’s okay_ , his expression seemed to say, and she was both amused and touched by this small effort to encourage her when he was the one at risk. Could he see the unease that she was trying so hard to mask? Did he know that there were things she’d say to him right now if they were alone? That she understood. That she was sorry too. That sometimes she dreamed of pure white sheets and untarnished emotions and guiltless mornings, but that had never been them and never would be. But she didn’t need to say any of it, because he already knew. And anyway, he would be back to himself in just a little while. No need to unearth buried history over something so trivial.

The bolts and restraints engaged. Young’s eyes fell shut and the smile died on his lips.

TJ adjusted her grip on Young’s weapon and settled in to wait.

 

* * *

 

The first thing he was aware of was a soul-deep sense of wonder laced with buzzing enthusiasm. He laughed, because even though the emotion wasn’t coming from himself, he recognized its flavor and intensity. It was like an electric current through his veins, the whirring and spinning of ideas in his head, the unfolding of possibilities, the lights flicking on, one after another. Rush was excited about something, and Young could feel his elation as if it was his own.

So this was what Eli had warned him about. It was _glorious_ . A little overwhelming - okay, a _lot_ overwhelming - but glorious.

Young opened his eyes and took in his surroundings. For a moment he was bewildered, because he was standing alone in the middle of Destiny’s gate room and something seemed… off. He turned in a complete circle, taking in the entire room, and finally settled on what was different about it. The metal surfaces were too bright and clean. The floor was polished. There was not a scuff or dent or rust stain in sight. Even the lighting seemed brighter than he remembered. It looked… new.

And then he looked down at himself, focusing first on his own sturdy hands and stocky frame. Much less elegant than the form he’d been wearing recently, but infinitely more comfortable. But his uniform was cleaner and less worn than he remembered. And when he raised his hands to his face, he couldn’t feel any trace of the beard that Rush had been growing while in his body. On a hunch, he reached up to feel his hair, and yes, it was close-cropped according to military regulations.

Destiny was brand new, and he was back to looking as he had when he first boarded her. He wasn’t sure what the significance of that was, but it was certainly interesting.

He felt a tentative tug on his thoughts, similar to the way his niece used to twitch at his shirt sleeve when she wanted attention from him. The sensation was gone almost as soon as it registered, but he thought he knew what it meant. Rush was getting impatient with him. What else was new?

Young wasn’t sure quite how he knew where to go, but he let instinct carry him through the halls toward the observation deck. The door was open, and Rush was standing directly ahead at the railing, his back to the entrance. But as Young entered the room, Rush turned around and… oh.

_Rush was standing under the Stargate on Icarus Base the first time Young saw him. He was craning his neck to examine some detail on the gate, and his expression was completely unguarded. He looked eager and perplexed and annoyed and stimulated all at once, and Young found that  play of emotions over his sharp features intriguing. He also couldn’t help noticing Rush’s slight, neat figure, set off nicely by blue jeans and a simple white button-down. There was something appealing about the whole package. Something that wormed its way under Young’s skin and settled there like it had no intention of ever leaving._

_Then Rush became aware of Young’s presence. Their eyes met, and Rush’s lips quirked into a smile that was more sardonic than welcoming. “You must be Colonel Young,” he said, and his accented voice set Young’s skin prickling in a way he didn’t think he liked. Or maybe, just maybe, he liked it a little too much._

Young sucked in a sharp breath as the brief flashback ended. Across the room, Rush was staring at him in no little astonishment, and Young realized he must have experienced it too. Right. No privacy. Great.

Well, now Rush knew that Young had felt some degree of attraction toward him from the beginning. There wasn’t anything particularly earth-shattering about that information, was there? Rush must know that he was attractive. And the knowledge that Young’s sexuality was a bit more flexible than his outward behavior would suggest wasn’t likely to phase him much. Rush had always seemed entirely indifferent to other people’s sex lives.

Still, a vague sense of discomfort washed back and forth between them like lapping waves. Rush stood in his white shirt and his jeans and his three days’ stubble and his mid-length hair, looking like he had stepped right out of Young’s memories. Well, except for the lingering traces of surprise in his expression - that was definitely new. They stared at each other for a few more seconds in silence, until Young finally had to laugh at the absurdity of two grown men balking at a little bit of attraction when just hours earlier, they had faced down four angry and well-trained opponents without hesitation.

“I’m sorry,” Young said, not sure whether he was apologizing for the flashback or for his laughter. “This is not really what I was expecting.”

Rush seemed to relax slightly at that. “Me neither, to be honest.”

Young crossed the room and joined him at the railing. “So you didn’t set all of this--” he waved a hand vaguely around the room, which was as bright and clean and new as the gate room had been, “--up?”

Rush shook his head. “I didn’t think a simulation would be necessary for this transfer. I guess Destiny disagreed.”

“So how do we get out of here?”

“When we’re ready, there will be doors for each us to pass through to return to our bodies,” Rush said. “We’ll know them when we see them, trust me.” He turned back towards the window and pointed. “Now, look at that. Completely unscarred. Beautiful, isn’t she?”

Young followed Rush’s pointing finger and looked out over the visible portions of Destiny’s hull. She was entirely free from damage, and Rush was absolutely right. She was breathtaking.

“I’ve already checked our course,” Rush said. His discomfiture had been replaced by a bubbling warmth which Young took to be an indication of his fondness for the ship. “We haven’t left the Milky Way yet.”

Young withdrew his gaze from the window and turned toward Rush. He found that he liked this view better. It was so good to see Rush in his own body again, even if it was just in a simulation. “So why would Destiny want to show us this?”

Rush shrugged. “I haven’t the faintest idea, but she usually has her reasons.”

That was not particularly comforting, given some of the other things Destiny had done for mysterious reasons. The no-win scenario came to mind. Whatever Destiny’s reason was for those torture sessions, he knew he didn’t approve of it. But he wasn’t going to think about that, not right at this moment when his emotions were so transparent to Rush.

“So why do we look like this?” he asked instead. “Like we did--”

“When we first met?” Rush finished for him. He shook his hair from his eyes and shot Young a sidelong look. “Something about coming full circle, perhaps?”

“Starting over.”

Rush smiled faintly. “Yes.”

“Well, I’m all for that,” Young said, trying to repress all the little flutters of happiness that threatened to burst forth from his soul like so many brightly-colored butterflies. Damn it, he was trying _not_ to dwell on those particular emotions right now. If Rush had been thunderstruck by the information that Young found him pleasing to look at, how would he respond to the full extent of Young’s feelings for him? God, he’d probably recoil in horror. No, no. Young needed to think about something else, and quickly.

Rush was looking at him strangely, a flicker of unease darting through the air between them. Shit.

“Before we think too much about starting over,” Young said hastily, fixing on a topic of conversation guaranteed to dampen the mood between them, “we’ve got one more looming problem to deal with.”

Rush tilted his head thoughtfully, and then Young’s meaning dawned on him. “Homeworld Command,” he muttered.

Yep, that had definitely spoiled the moment.

“You asked me to trust you to fix us,” Young said, “and I did. Even though all of this… sitting in the chair and having my consciousness uploaded to a computer, that was about the last thing I wanted to do.”

“That was different. There wasn’t any danger,” Rush protested, radiating a mixture of irritation and apprehension. “Or at least,” he amended, “the dangers were - _are_ \- minimal.”

Young dipped his head in acknowledgement. “I know you said that, Rush,” he said patiently, “but I don’t know what the hell goes into something like this. I don’t know how to decipher your programming code or figure out the math you used. I can’t check your work and feel satisfied that you’ve done everything you can to keep us safe. I’ve got to take your word on faith.”

Rush fidgeted and looked away. The atmosphere was growing thick with his discomfort.

“I’m not going to let anyone replace you, Rush,” Young promised. “I will fix this.”

He tried to let Rush feel how determined he was to protect him. If Rush had any concept of how important this was Young, how deeply invested he was in Rush’s future, then surely Rush wouldn’t have so much trouble trusting him. But there was the rub, because Young didn’t want Rush to get an inkling of all the reasons _why_ Young felt so invested in him. It was a balancing act - he had to reveal just enough to be convincing and try to conceal the rest.

Rush still wasn’t looking at him. “So what are you asking me to do?”

“Face the hearing. Let me handle your defense.”

Rush snorted and shook his head emphatically. “I’ve seen that kind of ’justice’ in effect,” he said. “I want no part in it.”

Young sighed. Rush hadn’t had many qualms about participating in Young’s evidentiary hearing years earlier, but… well, the boot had been on the other foot then, hadn’t it?  But perhaps it wasn’t too surprising that Rush felt so dismayed at the thought of being in that situation himself. Young hadn’t exactly gotten a fair hearing, and Rush probably wasn’t expecting one either.

“Rush,” he said softly, letting his sincerity color his tone and then drift out like a plume of smoke to curl through the space that separated them. “I will not let anyone take Destiny away from you. I promise. I’ll stake my command on this; I don’t know how to make it any clearer than that. Please, trust me.”

 

* * *

 

Rush arrived first. Well, he always did, didn’t he? But he was so delighted and distracted by the marvelous gift Destiny had given them both that he almost didn’t notice when Young joined him. Only gradually did he become aware of the slide of the man’s mind beneath his own experiences. Slow, but powerful, relentless but fluid, not like the rockslide he had been expecting at all, but like water. Like a great river that over time will wear its way through any obstacle. And that was appropriate perhaps for the landscape of mud that Rush had been left with when it was withdrawn, but a pleasant surprise nevertheless. He had not expected anything quite so substantial.

Young still took an inordinate amount of time to adjust to the simulation however, and then became immediately distracted by thoughts of...

Attraction to _Rush_?

Rush didn’t know what to make of the flashback. It interrupted his own flow of thoughts like a missing relay, utterly unexpected and bizarre. _I mean... He... It..._

He got a grip on his thoughts after what seemed far too long a time, and for all he told himself not to consider this here, where even his most private thoughts were exposed, some conclusions presented themselves regardless:

There was something to be said for the fact that Young kept interrupting Rush’s orderly existence like this, with these concepts that were unthinkable. One of the most terrible things about being a scientist confronted with the unknown was the awareness that his brain had its biases and its blindnesses. That there might be things out there that he wasn’t understanding simply because he was him. In which case it was useful to have someone else on hand whose blind-spots did not coincide with his own. And quite clearly Young was seeing an entirely different universe than he was.

If he recalled that meeting himself he remembered Young as a solid wall of muscle with an air of superiority that had simultaneously intimidated and infuriated him. He had thought the man’s small smile was patronizing, had imagined that Young was looking down on him for not having solved the problem yet, for not having fulfilled the minor use the military had for him.

Well, it seemed he’d been very wrong about that.

Personally, Rush was glad he had sailed through life without having to deal with the messiness of physical attraction, except on those two occasions where he had found people he cared for enormously and thought he could trust entirely.

These days there was probably a name for that, some kind of socio-psychological semi-Greek jargon, but in his day it had been known as ‘virtue.’ Perhaps the only part of Rush’s life where virtue had come naturally to him.

In an effort to get Young’s attention off himself so that he could pull own mind back behind decent boundaries, he suggested that Young take a look at the ship. It was worth seeing - the grandeur of her unscarred, when she was young and hopeful. But perhaps, as with Chloe, and himself, he liked Destiny better as she was in the present. Battle scarred and presumably wiser for it.

As he smiled out at Destiny’s memories, the concept that Young found him attractive worked its way from his mind and into his heart, where it elicited a rare warmth.

He tried to tell himself that he mustn’t read too much into the discovery - Young was probably the kind of man who would fuck anything that moved if it gave him the chance. Being fancied by him hardly made Rush _special_ or anything. But it was strangely delightful nevertheless and he treasured it, somewhat against his own will.

And then of course Young had to ruin it by suggesting that Rush get back on those fucking communication stones and allow the morons at Homeworld Command another chance to separate him from his Destiny.

Young’s rare eloquence was one of the strengths Rush had never been able to deny. The man had a knack of capturing the imagination and the emotions in simple unvarnished words that his hearers generally responded to as if to a magic spell.

“I will not let anyone take Destiny away from you... Please, trust me.”

Here in Destiny’s memories, untethered from the flesh, he could feel Young’s sincerity like a physical thing, like an ache in his own bones. It simply wasn’t possible to be mistaken about the fact that Young would do everything in his power to make sure Rush was not robbed of his life’s work. Young would fight for Rush’s soul with all the strength and guile in him.

And that meant a lot. It really did. It was almost as astonishing as watching Young be all but beaten into the ground in Rush’s defense. He sometimes wondered if this restructuring of his whole self would ever end, but if it kept being accompanied by unexpected support and companionship and friendship then perhaps he didn’t want it to.

Which made it all the worse that he was going to have to bite the hand that was being held out to him here. And it was being held out in such certainty, in the heartfelt evident belief that so naked an emotional appeal would convince anyone.

He thought he had enough of a grasp of how Young’s mind worked to suppose that rejecting it would indeed put them right back to the very beginning again, as they had been when they first met. It would wipe out all the progress they had made since then and see them as implacable enemies once more. Was Destiny cruel enough to have meant that with this setting? He hoped not. But he could not do what Young asked of him. This was something he simply could not do.

Young’s faltering hope fed across the interface between them, and Rush turned away from it with a tearing sensation. Unable to quite bring himself to say it and have done, he fell back cravenly on distraction.

“While we’re here, we should take advantage of this simulation to explore the ship. That heavy industrial area in section three that’s currently exposed to vacuum? We could go see what’s in there. It occurs to me that there might be a working sarcophagus somewhere on the ship for which the items I’ve been trying to assemble are merely spare parts. If we could find it, we could make repairing the route to it a priority.”

In silence, Young turned to look out over the ship once more. It was good to see him in his own body again, though Rush was struck with unwelcome regret to see how much straighter his back had been in those days, how much smoother his face, without the deep lines that failure, pain and weariness had scored in it since. He looked handsomer here than Rush remembered, but Rush did not approve of the buzz-cut. He missed the wild polynomials of Young’s unruly hair.

There had not yet been an explosion of wrath, but that might have been preferable to the heartache, the careful weary patience that colored Young’s response. “Do we even know how much time we’re spending in here?”

That was a good question, actually.

“No.” Rush acknowledged, writhing a little on the rack of Young’s reflected emotions. Was this flood of feeling going on all the time under Young’s still surface? Why did it matter so desperately to him anyway? Why did he _care_ this much? “Our subjective experience is not a good guide to how much time is passing outside.”

“So while we’re chasing down possibilities in here our bodies could be dying. They could be dying right now, for all we know.”

Rush wanted... It would be nice to believe that all this powerful feeling was for him. That Rush was cared about not merely as a useful asset, but simply because he was Nicholas Rush. He wished he could believe that. But at the same time, if it was true, it was only going to make this worse.

“Don’t you think it’s worth the risk?” he said, still talking about something else, because that was easier.

Young gave a deep sigh and bowed his head into his hands, while it seemed like the bright lit observation room - the very stars outside - darkened and went out with the force of his disappointment.

“Don’t evade the issue Rush. Why won’t you trust me? You’ve got to be able to tell I mean it, I don’t get--”

“Honesty in all things, eh? Alright then, lets see how you like it.” Rush refused to wrap his arms around himself, acknowledged that perhaps there was no point in putting it off any further. But if he could have done - if he could have put it off for the rest of their lives, he would have, because this was... this was the end.

“I trust that you mean what you say, Colonel, and I thank you for that. But it’s not your sincerity that I doubt. It’s your ability. I don’t doubt that you would do this if you could. But I don’t think you’re capable of it.”

He waited on tenterhooks for the burning resentment that must follow such a statement. Rush would not have stood to have his own competence called into question in such a way. It would have struck him to the core and sparked an enmity out of him that could scarcely have been mellowed by ten years of apologies. He truly regretted having to do it to someone he had started to think of as a possible friend.

Young absorbed it in silence as he always did, without a change of expression, and Rush anticipated fury with such certainty that he didn’t immediately understand that the little seed of feeling that was blossoming under Young’s stoic exterior was not anger at all but relief.

“You’re telling me you don’t think the plan will work?”

“Well, I’m not sure it’s a plan at all, is it? You’re asking me to throw myself on these peoples’ mercy and hope for their good will? I wouldn’t risk a dog on those odds.”

“You don’t think Camile and I can talk them round?”

Put that way it gave him pause. Hadn’t he just been thinking himself that Young’s ability to sway a crowd was an undeniable skill?

“Rush, I know people the way you know computers. I know General O’Neill, I trust him. I can do this.”

Rush had a certain respect for O’Neill’s brand of wily intelligence too. Anyone of whom Samantha Carter spoke well could hardly be a complete idiot. And O’Neill had chosen Young, O’Neill must have been able to see, long before Rush did, the potential that was there.

This network of personal ties, this world of trust and emotion and loyalty... Rush found it alien and upsetting. He didn’t understand its rules. When he set a foot in it, he inevitably blundered. But perhaps that was what he had Young for.

It would be easier to believe all this sentiment was a strength and not a weakness, if Young had not lost the ship because of it. But because he had, Rush couldn’t... couldn’t quite...

Young ducked his head and smiled. He didn’t _seem_ bitterly insulted. He seemed amused and tolerant, and something worn and soft that Rush couldn’t quite fit a name to but would have curled up in like a blanket if he could. Fondness, perhaps.

“Rush... How about we assume this is going to happen, and you tell me what we need to do to make you happy with it? What would even the odds enough so you’d be okay to go?”

Another good question. Wonder of wonders. It seemed when they weren’t wasting energy shouting at each other they were both more effective. Cautiously, Rush rolled his simulated shoulders to work the tension out and allowed himself a sliver of rejoicing. Perhaps they were not going to despise each other forever after all.

“I suppose... I’d want an escape plan, to make sure I could come back if it went wrong. I’d want...” He hadn’t expected to be asked - hadn’t actually expected to allow himself to be persuaded this far - so he was making this up on the spot.

“Greer is good at cutting unwanted connections. We take him with us and leave him in the stones room to bring us back, if it goes badly.”

“Man, you are a suspicious son of a bitch,” Young said - which, from the emotional context, seemed to be a compliment. It was certainly not news to Rush, and therefore no rebuke.

The feeling he was getting now from Young was a kind of suspension, like a high diver pausing to nerve himself up before he springs into space. He gathered from it that he was asking a great deal. More, perhaps than he knew. It went on a long time. Longer than he could stand without drumming his fingers against the railing and telling himself twice that he must not soften or give in.

“Listen,” said Young at last, grim, resolved, but just a little amused underneath it all. “If it comes to pulling you back against orders, that’s technically mutiny and they could shoot me for it. So officially I know _nothing_ about this, okay?”

He hadn’t meant to ask that much. But now that he had, he was tremendously interested to see how Young would go on.

“Unofficially, the person we take to deactivate the stones at need? Should probably be Chloe. We can use Chloe as a character witness for you - her mom’s got political clout, her voice will carry weight, and it’ll look like that’s why we brought her. But if we have to retreat, no one’s going to come down hard on a senator’s daughter. She can claim she accidentally wandered into the wrong room and innocently fiddled with some tech she didn’t understand. Then we can pull her stone from this side and deal with the fallout once we’re home.”

Rush despised the military sometimes. Oh, scratch that, he despised them in principle all of the time, but particularly at this moment. Why did they always have to make everything so hard?

“I... don’t want you to have to do that for me.”

Young smiled as though Rush had said something significant, and the mood of the simulation became buoyant again with determined cheer. “Thank you, Rush. But _I_ believe that Camile and I have got this covered and it won’t come to that anyway. So... we’re agreed? We’re going to Earth, get this mess sorted once and for all?”

He still didn’t want to. He was still, really, scared deep down. But after these last weeks of revelation and hope he was prepared to offer Young all the trust he could muster. There wasn’t much of it, but it was all he had.

“Oh very well,” he said, trying not to sound as uncertain as he felt. “I suppose so. If we must.”


	18. Chapter 18

“Welcome back,” was the first thing Young heard when he opened his eyes.

He blinked a few times and then focused on TJ’s face suspended over him. Light shone through her tousled updo, setting her golden strands aglow. She was smiling at him as if he had just given her the best gift she could ask for, and he was too disoriented to understand the meaning behind her expression. But he smiled back, because he was happy that she was happy, and because there was a comforting pocket of warmth surrounding his heart that he couldn’t quite identify, but which he liked very much.

Young drew in a deep breath, taking in the mingled scents of medicinal herbs and alcohol, and realized that he was in the infirmary. He was stretched out on a cot, and his body felt solid and substantial and well broken-in.

“Guess it worked,” he said. His voice rumbled, low and familiar, with just a touch of rasp due to his sore throat. With a soft groan for his various little aches and pains, he pushed himself up into a sitting position. He looked down at himself, flexing blunt fingers and rolling his shoulders experimentally. “How long was I out?”

“Just a few hours,” TJ said. “How do you feel?”

“Better,” he said, then huffed a voiceless laugh. Of _course_ he felt better. This body hadn’t gotten nearly as banged up in yesterday’s fight. He could feel bruising here and there, especially on his neck, but nothing like what he had sustained in Rush’s body.

The thought of Rush brought with it the sudden, overpowering memory of the simulation. Oh god. Oh _god_. Had any of that really happened? Had he really felt the brush of Rush’s consciousness like vibrations from an active piece of alien tech, unfathomable and intricate and fascinating? Had he really experienced Rush’s emotions as if they originated within himself - as if he and Rush shared a single body and soul between them? Had Rush really responded to his earnest entreaty with simple honesty? Had they really reached an agreement without first exchanging blows and bitter words? Had Rush really shown concern over the risk Young was prepared to take for him?

Yes. That had definitely happened. _Jesus_.

“Are you sure?” TJ asked, and when he looked back at her he noted that her smile had vanished. She was now wearing her serious _I am the senior medical officer and you will do as I say or so help me, I_ will _stab you in the ass with a syringe_ expression. He knew better than to fool around when she looked like that.

“I’m fine,” he said hastily. “Sorry, I was just… remembering something.” He shot a quick glance around the room at the surrounding cots, but all of them were empty. “Where’s Rush?”

TJ looked somewhat reassured by his question. “He left about fifteen minutes ago.” She paused, pressing her lips together. Then she added in an almost apologetic undervoice, “He took your gun.”

Young barked out a laugh that sounded uncharacteristically bright and carefree to his own ears. “Of course he did,” he said, imagining Rush hobbling around Destiny in an SGC uniform and supporting himself on Young’s G36. The fact that Young himself had done exactly the same thing in Rush’s body a few hours earlier didn’t lessen his enjoyment of the mental picture, because now it was _Rush_ hauling that big-ass weapon around, and something about that was just priceless. And it was good, too, because if anyone else was thinking about jumping Rush, the gun would be a nice deterrent. It didn’t even matter that it was unloaded; it still looked menacing, and it would double as a blunt weapon if necessary.

“I thought it was better not to argue with him,” TJ said ruefully. “It was a victory just getting him to take an anti-inflammatory for his swollen knee before he left. He seemed pretty impatient to get out of here.”

 _Eager to put his newly restored brain to work_ , Young wondered, _or just anxious to get away from me?_ It was probably a mixture of the two, and Young couldn’t really fault him for either sentiment. They both needed a little space and time to process all that had happened.

“Speaking of which,” TJ added. She turned away to retrieve something from a nearby table, and a moment later Young found a cup of herb-scented water being pressed into his hands.

“TJ, I’m fine,” he protested, trying to give it back.

“Humor me,” she insisted. “It’s a small dose. Your neck has a bit of swelling and I’d like to bring it down.”

Young used his free hand to rub at his neck, which was quite tender. “Ah,” was his only comment. He was glad he hadn’t actually witnessed Baras getting his hands around Rush’s neck; he was angry enough over it without that clear mental picture. And yes, he was being rather hypocritical. After all, his own hands had left some pretty noticeable bruises on Rush’s neck in the past. But while he knew his feelings to be irrational on this point, Young still thought it ought to be a recognized rule that only _he_ was allowed to throttle Rush.

He dutifully drank TJ’s medicine in one gulp and returned the cup to her. She set it aside and then seated herself beside him on the cot.

Her smile had returned, warming her eyes. “It really is good to have you back,” She said, and there was the barest catch of emotion in her voice.

Young eyed her warily. Judging by her tone, she wasn’t just pleased that he looked like himself again. She had said it as if she’d missed him. As if he had truly been absent. As if he had been temporarily erased from existence and something _else_ had been occupying Rush’s body for the past two and a half weeks. _Et tu, TJ?_

“I never went anywhere, you know,” he said, keeping his tone carefully neutral.“I was here the whole time.”

“I know,” she assured him. Her smile faded, but she held his gaze unflinchingly. “I never doubted that it was you in Rush’s body, if that’s what you’re thinking. But you were changing. It was a gradual process, but everyone could see it.”

Young shook his head as if he could shake off the implications of her words. He wanted to tell her that she was simply wrong, but he recalled that Chloe had tried to point out the very same thing a few days ago. At the time, he had assumed that Chloe was misinterpreting his actions based on his physical appearance. She saw Rush in him because he looked like Rush, end of story. But in retrospect, that argument didn’t really hold water. People on Destiny were used to seeing visitors walking around in borrowed bodies. There was rarely any confusion over this; it was usually pretty easy to tell when a guest consciousness was inhabiting a particular body. So if the entire ship had started wondering if Young was turning into Rush… well, maybe he should have taken the idea a bit more seriously.

“I was adjusting to someone else’s brain,” he said, and it came out sounding like a plea.

“Exactly,” TJ said. She shifted closer with a purposeful look in her eyes, and Young resisted an irrational urge to scoot away. He could feel that tickling sense of foreboding that he had honed into a survival tool over the course of his career. Right now, it was warning him that he was about to hear something he didn’t like.

“What do you think is responsible for regulating behavior?” TJ asked pointedly. “The brain isn’t just housing for your consciousness. It determines a lot about your personality. And it’s true that you can detach a mind from its host body, but it can’t think or form memories on its own - we know that because of what happened to Ginn and Doctor Perry. The communication stones let people switch bodies temporarily without those complications, but that’s not what happened to you. You were completely disconnected from your own body and trapped in someone else’s, and let’s be honest, Rush’s brain was probably a bad fit for your consciousness. So your mind was undergoing changes to fit a new framework, and it was beginning to affect your behavior in noticeable ways.”

“You got all that just because I was learning Ancient?” Young asked with more skepticism than he actually felt.  Her explanation sounded pretty reasonable, but he didn’t want to contemplate the idea that he could have been changing in ways he hadn’t even been aware of.

“No, of course not,” she said patiently. “You were starting to speak more… clinically about things. You spent less time with the crew. You let Scott take over most of the day-to-day management of the military personnel. Sometimes you’d look at something, and it was like you were taking it apart inside your mind and putting it back together again. You were slowly withdrawing into your own head and it was… kind of eerie to watch, actually.”

Young just stared at her, aghast at her description of his behavior. But now that she had laid it out for him, he could see that she was right. Socializing had seemed less important in the past few weeks, and so had making the rounds amongst his SGC personnel to boost moral and make sure his command was something they felt tangibly. He had isolated himself, spending too much time conjugating Ancient verbs and discussing the ship’s systems with the science team and not enough time building and maintaining the crew’s trust in him. It was such a fundamental part of his job, and he had let it slip. _Again_. Not due to the heavy weight of depression; he didn’t have that excuse this time. No, he had simply been too distracted to do his duty.

TJ was looking at him sympathetically, as if she could read his thoughts. “It… wasn’t as bad as I’m making it sound,” she said gently.

“No,” he murmured, “I think maybe it was.”

“Well, don’t beat yourself up over it,” she said, laying a hand on his knee and giving it a light squeeze. “There’s no lasting harm done.”

Young looked down at the hand which rested so pointedly yet so innocently on his person. After a brief moment of hesitation, he placed his own hand over it and let himself enjoy the simple, uncomplicated comfort of human contact.

“I suppose not,” he agreed, reluctantly pushing aside a fresh new source of guilt. Time to let that self-destructive habit go. No more swallowing stones… whatever the hell that meant. He was going to have to ask Rush to explain that one fully. “I have Rush to thank for that, though. Another timely save from our resident gremlin and Ancient tech whisperer.”

TJ’s gave a startled snort and her shoulders shook. “Those sound like contradictory terms.”

“And yet they both fit,” Young said, smiling at her.

She shook her head, regarding him in mingled amusement and curiosity. “Something’s different. The two of you seem to have reached some sort of truce recently.”

Young felt his smile falter. No, not a truce. A truce was what they’d had before. Something cold and impersonal. Something they had abided by because it was necessary, not because they had cared for each other. That was the theory, anyway. And maybe Rush still didn’t care, or not very much. But whatever this was, it wasn’t a mere ceasefire. This was something more akin to peace. The question was, could it last?

“Yeah,” he said, lifting his hand from hers and running it through his hair instead. Oh, right. Curls. Not quite what he had been expecting. “Something’s different.”

TJ ducked her head and laughed ruefully. She withdrew her hand from his knee. “Right. None of my business.”

“No, no, it’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that there’s nothing else to report. I have no clear idea of where Rush and I stand right now. I just… I think it’s better. It _is_ better.”

“Good.”

They smiled at each other for a moment, but some of the warmth of their interaction had bled away. Maybe they were both aware of how much he was holding back, or maybe she had a few hidden thoughts of her own to guard. Either way, it was time for him to go and get started on some of the duties he had been neglecting over the past few weeks.

His stomach gave a sharp pang in protest to this plan. Okay then, maybe he would stop in at the mess first. He suspected that Rush hadn’t eaten anything since before he had worked out his plan to un-switch their consciousnesses. Which meant this body had probably gone at least twenty-four hours without food. Really, it would have been nice if Rush had treated Young’s body with slightly more care than he typically spared for his own, but perhaps that was asking too much.

“I’d better get going,” he said, rising. “I’m suddenly starving.” He wobbled slightly and had to brace himself on the edge of the cot. Damn. Adjusting to a new center of gravity was such a bitch.

TJ hopped to her feet and stood by, ready to offer assistance if he should need it. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” he grunted, pushing himself upright again.

She looking him over critically and then nodded, apparently satisfied that he could stand on his own two feet without injury. “You should probably check in with Camile. She was in here an hour ago. Apparently there’s been some development about Rush’s hearing.”

 _Development_. What a frustratingly uninformative word that was.

“Food first,” Young decided. Then he would turn his mind back to Rush’s problems.

 

* * *

 

As it happened, Camile caught up with him before he had taken more than a half-dozen steps away from the infirmary. She came striding up the corridor, clipboard in hand, wearing a purposeful expression, and it didn’t look like she was prepared to take “later” for an answer.

“Camile,” Young said before she had time to get a word in, “I’m about ready to eat anything that happens to be in my path, so unless you have truly earth-shattering news--”

“Rush’s hearing is cancelled,” Camile interrupted.

Young actually stumbled and stopped in his tracks in his surprise. At first he thought he couldn’t possibly have heard correctly. He wondered if there were any words meaning “definitely going to be a living hell” that rhymed with “cancelled.” Then he noticed her smirk, and wondered if she could possibly be pulling his leg. It was just too good to be true. Rush didn’t have good enough karma to get out of this mess that easily. Hell, Young’s karma wasn’t all that great, either.

“Don’t get too excited yet. He’s not completely off the hook,” Camile continued, and Young felt perversely relieved to know that his hard-earned cynicism had not failed him. “General O’Neill has called an informal meeting to be held in his office the day after tomorrow.”

That… actually sounded promising. “Who will be present?” Young asked.

“Besides you and I, Rush, and the General, just Colonel Telford and Doctor McKay,” Camile said.

Yes, that sounded _very_ promising. Telford, of course, would argue strenuously for Rush’s replacement, and McKay _might_ back him up. But Young knew how to talk to O’Neill in an informal setting. He only needed to be himself; he was well aware that the General appreciated his direct, unembellished way of speaking. They understood each other. They always had.

Young started walking toward the mess hall again, but he gestured for Camile to accompany him. “That’s definitely better than a formal hearing. How did you pull that off?”

Camile fell into step beside him. “Well, Rush isn’t military, so he can’t be court-martialed. As a civilian, he falls under the IOA’s jurisdiction.”

“Yeah,” Young said, “but I didn’t get the impression that this was supposed to be a court hearing.”

“It was actually intended to be a glorified job performance review.”

Young shot her a sidelong look. She looked about as unimpressed with that idea as he felt. “Uh-huh” he said. “Only the penalty for poor performance isn’t that you get fired. You just get permanently ripped out of your body instead.”

Camile smiled grimly. “Something like that. Homeworld Command is desperate to fire Rush, and they’d be perfectly within their rights to do so. The problem is, of course, that they can’t force Rush to stop working and hand off all of his projects to someone else. And they don’t trust you to force him into it, either.”

“Getting fired kind of loses its meaning when you’re billions of light years from Earth. This isn’t a day job - it’s a matter of survival. Rush is an essential part of this crew.”

“Which is why they wanted to swap him out for someone equally qualified,” Camile said. Her smile turned self-satisfied. “But as the IOA has just reminded Homeworld Command, they don’t have the legal authority to do that. If Rush is to be stripped of his autonomy, he’ll have to be convicted of a crime first.”

“And the IOA would oversee his trial,” Young murmured as an answering smile began to tug at the corners of his lips.

“Right. So the IOA has invited Homeworld Command to submit evidence of Rush’s criminal acts for their consideration, and the IOA will then decide whether to pursue the matter further.”

And Homeworld Command had very little evidence against Rush. They had Young’s own watered-down reports, Telford’s conspiracy theories, and, potentially, a few eyewitness accounts from SGC personnel who had swapped with crewmembers and those members of the crew who were willing to support Telford’s cause. But there was only one piece of physical evidence that Rush had ever committed a crime on Destiny, and that was saved on a flash drive in Young’s quarters. And really, it might be time to destroy that particular memento of their sordid past. He felt he no longer needed it as an insurance policy against Rush’s machinations. Maybe - hopefully - they were beyond that.

“So, what is this meeting about, in that case?” Young asked. “It sounds like Rush’s enemies at Homeworld Command are pretty much stuck.”

Camile adjusted her grip on her clipboard and sighed. “Not quite,” she said. “They’re pushing to open an investigation into Rush’s activities on Destiny. They’re hoping they can get enough evidence against him so that IOA won’t have any choice but to take action. And honestly, Colonel…” She trailed off, looking vaguely worried for the first time during their conversation.

It was definitely time to destroy that flash drive, Young decided.

“If it comes to that, we’ll handle it,” he said with a confidence he was far from feeling. He knew exactly what Camile was insinuating with that unfinished sentence. A large part of the crew didn’t trust Rush, and many would assist enthusiastically in the investigation. And Rush’s track record was far from flawless. If Homeworld Command became aware of just how many incriminating details Young had omitted or glossed over in his reports, it could get ugly. Harmony on Destiny had always been more important to him than transparency with Homeworld Command, but that could come back to bite him in the ass now.

It was strange to realize how long he had been protecting Rush from the full consequences of his actions. Even back when Young had hated him, he’d made a habit of sweeping Rush’s questionable conduct under the rug and moving on. His own conduct had been so far from irreproachable that he could hardly have done otherwise. Now they both had a vested interest in keeping Homeworld Command’s snout out of their business.

Young and Camile had reached the doorway to the mess hall by now, but Young found that he wasn’t feeling quite so ravenous as he had a few minutes ago. He hesitated and glanced back at Camile.

She was watching him meditatively, hugging her clipboard to her chest. “We won’t have to handle it,” she said after a moment, “because this meeting is going to go well for us. General O’Neill has the final say on whether there will be an investigation, and I think he’ll listen to you. If you can make sure Rush doesn’t open his mouth, we’ll be fine.”

Young smiled ruefully. He’d never had the pleasure of seeing the General interact with Rush, but he could imagine just how well that would go. He doubted very much that O’Neill had any patience for Rush, and Rush’s instinctive distrust of the military would naturally encompass the General. It was certainly a bad combination. “Fortunately,” he said, “Rush is _grudgingly_ prepared to let us handle this for him.”

Camile looked mildly impressed. “So he’s willing to trust us that far? I wish I knew how you managed that.”

“It’s kind of a long story.”

“Ah.” She appeared rather curious, but she didn’t ask him to elaborate. Instead, she looked him over critically and said, “Congratulations, by the way. You look much more comfortable now.”

Young was grateful for the change of subject, and he found that he liked being congratulated on his return to his own body much more than he liked being welcomed ‘back.’ He flashed a grin at her. “But not as cute, presumably.”

“Well, no,” she agreed, “but that might be for the best. Now you look like a commander.”

Well, that had certainly been the least painful transfer of command between them to date. He snorted, amused. “I think the commander is going to get some lunch before he resumes his duties. Join me?”

“Honestly,” she said, “I’m not very hungry.”

“Perfect, I’ll eat yours too. Come on.”


	19. Chapter 19

Between mealtimes Dunning measured his confinement in paces. Three times a day the door would open and there’d be two of the guys outside, one with a bowl and bucket, the other with a rifle. He’d hand over his crap bucket in exchange for the empty one, grab the plate and the canteen offered, and he’d look at the guys in the hope that they’d say something.

After the third time they didn’t, he tried asking “So how’s...” But they shut the door on him and left him to say “...things?” to the bare metal.

The rest of the time he walked from one corner of the room to the other, slantways to make the greatest distance, and then back, counting paces, measuring minutes and hours and days by turns.

He had plenty of time to think but he wasn’t great at that, to be honest. So he’d only just reached the conclusion _I fucked up. I fucked up real bad,_ when the door opened a mere three hundred fifty seven paces into the afternoon and Colonel Young came in.

Later O’Hara asked him mockingly how he could tell it was Young at all. You know, if something had come out of the stones and taken up residence in the chair, like he had suggested, why did Young being back in his own body make such a difference? Dunning hadn’t been able to give her an answer. He couldn’t say, not for sure. But at that moment, he just _knew_. He just knew, okay, that everything was fine again and the Colonel was back, and there was someone in charge he could trust to know what to do.

So he came to attention automatically, and even though he was in deep shit, even though the Colonel had a purple necklace of bruises from someone’s hands around his throat and was holding himself with a straightness that meant pain, the only thing Dunning felt right then was relief.

Greer, behind the Colonel, gave him a withering look, as if he meant to say ‘stop smiling,’ but Young just looked at him for a long second and something about his face relaxed, like it was maybe not as bad as he’d feared.

“Airman Dunning?”

“Sir?”

“You know who I am?”

Dunning nodded, glad to be given questions to answer. If Young had just demanded an explanation he didn’t think he could get it out straight. “Yes, sir, Colonel Young, sir.”

“And when you attacked me, did you know who I was then?”

His shock came out sounding like indignation. “No sir! I would never! I mean...” what _did_ he mean? It was all so hard to keep straight in his head. “I mean, I didn’t know _what_ it was but I did know it wasn’t you. The kids these days, they don’t remember the Goa’uld, what it was like when it was bad. What the snakes were like, taking people over, getting inside you, but... you do, sir, don’t you? You were there.”

Young didn’t look like he was impressed by this personal appeal, but then he never did, did he? You just had to kinda know that it was there underneath. Shared nightmares and the understanding that came with them. All that jazz.

It was only right for Young not to stoop to reply when he was in the middle of delivering a dressing down. But Dunning figured it had got through anyway. That was why it mattered so much that you knew for sure what was inside.

“You attacked a superior officer, Airman. Are you aware I could have you shot?”

More shock, and then a kind of weird mixture of fear and remorse and trust, like he was falling, falling, but he knew it was a fairground rollercoaster and his harness would keep him safe, because no, he hadn’t thought of that, and yes, he was a fucking idiot, and yet he didn’t believe for a moment Young would do it, even if he had every right to, because this was the Colonel and the Colonel wasn’t like that.

“I... Uh... I didn’t think of that.”

“Because?”

“Because you weren’t you sir, and everyone could see it, and all the guys were freaked and no one was doing anything about it.”

Young nodded, and moved to one side so there was a clear route out through the door, freedom just a few paces away. Dunning didn’t move.

“Dunning?”

“Sir?”

Young folded his hands behind his back like he was on inspection, very stern. “You want to know who to thank for getting me back?”

Dunning had assumed TJ because she pretty much had a handle on medical miracles these days, but something about Young’s intensity said it wasn’t going to be what he expected and he had better pay close attention.

“It was Rush.”

“Sir?” He coughed to try to lower his suddenly squeaky voice. That made no sense. Why would _Rush_ undo something he’d deliberately done like that? Unless... unless the first rumor was true and actually it had been Telford and McKay who were responsible for the bodyswap all along?

Dunning shifted on his feet, feeling like the floor had lurched under him. Rush fixed this? But would that mean that Rush - Rush had just been innocently fucked over by those shitheads at Homeworld Command like the Colonel had? Would that mean that maybe all that time he was hiding out, afraid to show his face, he was actually hard at work on a way to set things right?

“So if you’d have put him in the infirmary like you planned, we might never have gotten back to normal at all..”

“No sir.” Oh shit. Well now he felt really stupid. Just cause nobody liked the guy didn’t suddenly make it okay to randomly hand the chief scientist his teeth for doing no more than his job. Dunning was still too rigidly at attention to hang his head, but he did the next best thing and cast his gaze down to the ground.

“Do you know what you should have done instead of just jumping us?”

That was a harder question than the others. He supposed he should have taken his concerns up the chain, said something to one of the officers, or all of them. “Said something to Scott, I guess. But he wouldn’t have listened. I mean it was you, sir, right? Of course he wouldn’t have listened. Who would?”

Young took his hands from behind his back and put them in his jacket pockets, kind of encouragingly. Half ‘okay we’ve got to the informal part now,’ half ‘I’m not so much pissed as disappointed with you. I thought you knew better.’

“TJ and Camile have both told me _they_ were concerned. The chances are that if you had spoken to Scott, you’d have found out that Scott was concerned too. At any rate, if all the enlisted men were freaked, that was something Scott needed to know. If the men have a problem with me, it’s Scott’s call what to do about it. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You do not take these decisions into your own hands, Airman, because when you do, you fuck up. Am I clear?”

That was a sad truth but Dunning felt absolutely no need to deny it. He’d fucked up. Again. And now he’d probably be lucky to get out of this room before Doomsday, and he couldn’t even complain about it because it was his own fault. “Yes sir.”

Young unbent enough to lean his shoulder against the door, and Dunning appreciated that the Colonel didn’t make a drama out of these things. None of that shouting and sneering and making you feel three feet tall like Telford did when you did something stupid.

“Seems to me,” said Young, “you need to learn to appreciate the useful work our science types put in for us. I’m going to assign you to the science team for a month to do their heavy lifting. They have three corridors to make airtight in that period, so there’s going to be considerable spacesuit time. You can return to your regular duties when that’s done.”

That was... going to be crap, to be honest, because those spacesuits stank to high heaven, and the science team didn’t know how to give an order you could understand without three hours of back and forth to clarify what it meant. But it was so much better than he’d either expected or deserved that he breathed out shakily and finally dared a step in the direction of the door. No one stopped him.

“Dunning?” As he passed Young, he caught the tail end of a smile.

“Sir?”

“I went to AETC with Major Kaplan.”

Dunning’s throat choked up, remembering Sue Kaplan with a bullet hole in her forehead. With her eyes closed she’d looked entirely human again, and he’d thought, _What have I done?_ Still did, sometimes, at nights. He’d often wondered if the Colonel had known her too. It was a big universe, but by comparison it was a pretty small Stargate program, particularly in the early days.

“You were a good friend to her at the end. But this was a different situation, and a bad call.”

You see. _You see?_ That was the kind of thing he was talking about. He didn’t know whether he wanted to cheer or apologize or cry, so he compromised on a salute. “Yes sir. And sir? It’s good to have you back.”

 

* * *

 

Camile paced slowly around the table in the stones room, flipping through the handwritten notes on her clipboard. She wasn’t sure why she bothered, really. Her notes weren’t extensive, and she already had them all memorized. She wasn’t even going to be speaking much at the impending meeting. This was the Colonel’s show, now. She would just provide support. So why did she have that unpleasant little lurching sensation in her stomach which always afflicted her when she found herself in a situation that had slipped out of her control?

It wasn’t Young that she was worried about. He had proven in the past two days that he was very much back to his old self. Possibly better than his old self, to be honest. His movements projected a new sense of purpose. His shoulders were straighter, as if they were no longer bowed by the weight of quite so many cares. He was reconnecting with the crew, and she had noticed that he was smiling rather more often than he used to. The changes were subtle; she doubted that most of the crew had even picked up on them. But they were real, and they were clearly positive, whatever their cause. So no, she had no doubts about his readiness for this meeting.

Rush, on the other hand… Well, he was always the wild card, wasn’t he? Many types of disasters could be planned for. Lists could be drawn up, supplies gathered, weapons stockpiled, and workers directed to various last-minute tasks. There was comfort in the ordered chaos of such preparations. But there was no planning for Rush. She had to take him on faith, and that really didn’t sit well with her.

Camile sighed and dropped her clipboard onto the table with a clatter. From her seat on the other side of the table, Corporal Barnes gave a little start.

“Sorry,” Camile murmured.

“That’s okay,” Barnes said as she set the box-like long-range communication device on the table. The case containing the stones sat open nearby. “I’m nervous too, and I’m not even going.”

Camile’s lips quirked at that. “Why are you nervous?” she asked curiously, leaning forward with her palms braced against the tabletop.

Barnes shrugged. She drew a piece of cloth out of the case and set it down very precisely a few inches to the right of the communication device. “I figure it’s my fault, indirectly,” she said calmly.

“Your fault?”

“I was on stones duty when Colonel Young and Doctor Rush visited Earth last time. But I left the room when Colonel Telford told me to, and that’s when Doctor McKay did… whatever he did to the stones,” Barnes explained. Her tone remained very matter-of-fact, but the set of her shoulders and her downcast eyes indicated that she was experiencing no little guilt.

Camile suppressed a sigh and cursed that peculiar combination of responsibility and blind obedience that seemed to be expected of SGC personnel. When duty conflicted with orders, how was a young Corporal supposed to know the right course of action? “That doesn’t make it your fault,” she said gently. “You were just--”

“Following orders,” Barnes finished for her, glancing up and flashing an ironical little smile. “I know. That’s what Colonel Young said too. Still, I’m not going to let anything like that happen on my watch ever again.”

Before Camile could reply, another voice spoke up from the doorway. “Won’t be a problem today,” Greer said as he swaggered into the room. He was heavily armed and appropriately scary-looking. “I’ll be in here, and I got Lee and O’Hara positioned in the hall. Our guests aren’t going anywhere they shouldn’t, and no one’s tampering with the stones.”

Camile straightened and met Greer’s eyes. He dipped his head in acknowledgement, a simple gesture that conveyed more than words ever could. His respect had been hard-earned, but she was grateful to have it. He was a valuable ally and a loyal friend.

“Thanks,” she said, returning his nod. “The others should be here in a few minutes.”

This prediction proved accurate insofar as Young and Chloe were concerned. They arrived together, speaking quietly as they entered the room. Camile still wasn’t quite clear on why Chloe was here. Young had said that, officially, she would act as a character witness for Rush. His wording implied that there was an unofficial reason for her presence, but Camile hadn’t asked. She knew that Rush and Chloe shared a bond of some sort. Maybe Chloe was here for moral support.

It would be hard for her to provide moral support to Rush if he didn’t bother to show up, however.

As if he had read her thoughts, Young glanced around the room and abruptly broke off his hushed conversation with Chloe. “Where’s Rush?” he asked sharply. He fixed his gaze pointedly on Camile as if Rush’s absence was somehow her fault.

“I thought you were handling him,” Camile shot back, irritated.

Greer snorted. “Late to his own damn meeting,” he commented. “Yeah, that sounds like Rush.”

“Well, that’s just great,” Young muttered, pulling out his radio. “Rush, come in,” he barked into it.

No response.

 _Wild card_ , Camile thought with all the dubious satisfaction of having her nebulous fears realized.

Young keyed his radio again. “ _Rush._ ”

Still nothing.

“Want me to find him and drag his ass in here, sir?” Greer asked. He sounded like he would relish the task.

Young’s expression clearly indicated that he thought Greer’s suggestion an appallingly bad one. But before he could say as much, the subject of their conversation strode into the room.

Rush’s head was bowed and he was rubbing at the back of his neck. His general air was one of discomfort and preoccupation, but he came alert fast enough when Young addressed him.

“Where have you been?” Young demanded.

Rush lifted his head and let his hand drop. He met Young’s eyes, and for a split second, Camile thought she detected a hint of confusion in his expression. But then it hardened, turning cynical and superior and just a little bit sullen, and she sighed inwardly. As the two men stared each other down with that baleful, excruciating tension that only they could generate, Camile reflected that some things really never changed.

To her surprise, it was Young who backed down first. “Never mind,” he said, turning away. “We’re going to be late if we don’t do this now.” He pulled out a chair at the table for Chloe and seated himself beside her, apparently having washed his hands of his lead scientist.

Rush stood there for a few beats longer, staring resentfully at Young’s straight, solid back. Then he gave his head an emphatic shake and dropped into the chair on Chloe’s other side.

As Camile took the remaining seat and selected one of the communication stones, she spotted Barnes smiling sympathetically at her from across the table. Camile snorted in acknowledgment. The situation was definitely beyond her control now. This meeting should be interesting.


	20. Chapter 20

Fear aside, it was fascinating to experience the exchange of bodies when one had a negative test case to compare them with. Rush was far more conscious, now, of the thin film of disconnect between his host body and himself. Touch, taste, balance, so forth, translated over well enough, but it was perhaps like watching a dubbed film - once aware of it, one could not become unaware that this was not quite the real thing.

He was thankful for it, as a distraction from the boil of incipient panic that seemed to be bubbling in his guts. He was almost thankful, even, for the fact that Young was being as famously insensitive as ever, and he’d be tempted to wring the fucker’s neck if he wasn’t at present trusting his entire future to the man. Bastard. Camile could wipe that holier than thou condemnatory expression off her face too. For God’s sake, as if neither of  _ them _ would think of turning up late for their own execution.

“I... ah...” Chloe - in Dr. Mehta’s body - staggered gracefully as the armed escort attempted to usher them all out of Homeworld Command’s stones room.

“Are you alright?” Camile had not been let in on this part of the plan, no doubt. At any rate, her concern seemed convincingly genuine.

“I feel sick.” Chloe squeezed her eyes shut with a frown. “I’m sure it’s nothing. I’ll just sit here a while to get my breath back.” She turned a fresh-faced appealing look on the Airman in charge of the stones, and Rush had to smooth down the beard he didn’t have in this body to conceal his smile of mingled pride and amusement.

“You go on,” she said. “I’ll catch you up. I think it must have been the transfer. It takes me like that sometimes.”

Their escort exchanged a worried glance with the stones tech. He took a single step towards the door and hesitated. “I was told to bring you all. I can’t leave unescorted civilians hanging round the base.”

Chloe drew out a seat, folded her arms on the counter and laid her head on them in an unresponsive silence that seemed to hint that she would rather be throwing up.

“Airman...” Young peered at the stones’ tech’s uniform, “Esteban here can radio for someone to come escort her to General O’Neill when she’s ready. You just stay here until then, Chloe. No wandering around, okay?”

“Mm hm,” Chloe agreed pathetically. Rush caught the edge of her mouth firming into a line that could have been distress but that he privately supposed was repressed laughter. The girl was a trooper, he was really terribly fond of her.

“Feel better.”

“Mm hm.”

With their rear guard in place, Rush’s internal weather calmed down from hurricane to mere lightning storm. He was able to walk to O’Neill’s office without his palms itching too hard for a screwdriver or a shiv or a large rock to defend himself with.

He didn’t want to do this. Why was he here? How the fuck had he ever allowed himself to be talked into this at all?

O’Neill’s office was indistinguishable from every other air force office Rush had ever been in. Pictures of ‘planes I have known’ up on the wall, along with an arcane array of medals that probably said something terribly impressive if you knew how to read them. The General looked as he always did - like he had not a care in the world and was considering taking a nap before dinner.

Rush hesitated under the lintel of the door, and Young and Camile crowded him inside. He would have snapped at them for it, but his attention was arrested by the sight of Telford in a sweater-vest, patting himself down in little fluttery nervous motions and glaring at a ramrod straight McKay as he did so.

“...because it doesn’t suit my constitution to be put through physical strain like that. It’s a finely tuned brain-body balance that’s taken me years to perfect, and if you’re going to be the unworthy possessor of a genius level intellect, the least you could do would be--”

Young caught Rush’s eye, and a rush of synergy went through Destiny’s crew as all three of them struggled not to laugh. Camile recovered first, though her voice was suspiciously wobbly in the higher tones as she approached Telford’s body with her hand extended. “Doctor McKay, I presume?”

Telford’s body rolled its umber eyes theatrically. “The remnant of him, at least.”

“So you must be Colonel Telford.”

Rodney’s body looked like it had shed ten pounds in the past weeks. The face was sharper and the set of its mouth more determined. His hands, which held a stack of files, were bruised over every knuckle and there was a powder burn on the side of his throat. “Yes, Camile, we’ve met.”

“Since we’re all playing musical bodies,” O’Neill beamed at everyone, “How about we have a round of introductions so we know who we’ve got here.” He looked directly at Rush with a comfortable sort of challenge that Rush didn’t know how to take. “I presume that’s you, Everett?”

“Actually sir, this is me. Um, Colonel Everett Young,” said Young from half way down the table. “Rush got the bodyswap thing fixed a couple of days ago.”

_ Point to me _ , Rush thought, watching the indignant expression fleet across McKay’s face and onto Telford’s. He had a moment of sweet, sweet vicious glee at the thought of rubbing it in, leaving them both like that to slowly decay into each other, as would amply serve them right.

But two considerations stopped him with the triumph unspoken on his lips:

1\. He was trying to prove how essential he was to Destiny’s mission. If he could rescue McKay it would be a convincing demonstration of who was the better scientist. 2. He really disliked the thought of the havoc Telford could wreak now that he had become a genius on top of everything else. That had to be corrected before it became a problem.

So instead he said, “I have the equations memorized if you two need some help setting your own house in order. Doubtless the Atlantis chair would work as well as Destiny’s, with a few modifications.”

Telford’s body gawped at him and threw up its big hands in a pantomime of disbelief. “Why didn’t I think of that? I should have thought of that! I swear, this being ‘normal’ is unbearable. If it goes on much longer I will definitely have to shoot myself. I don’t know how you people  _ stand _ it.”

Rush threw himself into the chair next to Young’s. Ever since the attempted mobbing he’d felt safer with Young at his shoulder, and that might be an entirely senseless reaction but at this moment he’d take an irrational comfort if that was all that was on offer. Triumph aside, he didn’t really have the patience right now to deal with McKay’s antics. “Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”

Telford gave a sharp bark of laughter that was more menacing than anything in McKay’s voice deserved to be. “You are so full of shit.”

O’Neill waggled a reproving finger at him, all it took to call the whole room to order. “Uh uh uh. I think that’s what this meeting was designed to determine. So how about we all sit down, and you show me what you got.”

Telford thunked his files onto the table and withdrew a summary sheet from the top. Rush’s squirming stomach sank a little lower as he fought not to scowl. You could say what you liked about Telford, but he was thorough.

“I have here a number of witness statements,” Telford began, and maybe it wasn’t apparent to everyone that he was smug, but it was clear enough to Rush. “Taken from members of Destiny’s crew while they were on Earth for scheduled stone visits.”

“Taken how?” Camile asked sharply. “I mean, were these people aware that they were being interrogated, or did you just ask them leading questions with a tape recorder in your pocket?”

“Does that matter?”

“It matters a great deal! How evidence is gathered determines whether it’s admissible or not.”

Telford smiled. “It matters in court. But your people have seen to it that this doesn’t come to court.”

Rush gathered himself to leap to his feet, make a dash for the closed door. This wasn’t a hearing at all, was it? This was just a very polite assault. But then his chair gave a weird lurch under him. When he looked down he found that Young had kicked one of the legs. He gave the man a puzzled look and Young caught his gaze and held it.

Right. He was supposed to be trusting Young to handle this. Right.

He blew out a breath and slumped back down. The dart of a glance towards O’Neill caught the general watching this exchange with that damnable omnipresent wry smile. Fuck it all.

“Let’s just hear it,” said O’Neill. “Like they always say, the innocent have nothing to fear.”

Rush was fucking doomed.

Telford picked up his first file, placed it down again on his right hand side, like he was telling a story and this was the start. “A score of witnesses testify that Rush deliberately interrupted the evacuation to Earth and dialed the ninth chevron address instead, stranding eighty untrained people in a life-threatening situation to which they had not consented.”

“I think I’ve already explained the damage that could have been done to Earth - or to any gate address in this or a neighboring galaxy - by the translation of all the energy of an exploding planet through the wormhole.”

“Oh that’s nonsense,” McKay piped up. “We’ve had a team of people working on the repercussions ever since, but the gist of it is that two points connected by a wormhole are no further apart, mathematically speaking, whether they are one galaxy away or a billion. The wormhole,” he made an encompassing gesture with Telford’s hands, “supersedes normal space time. Which means that the same amount of energy would have been translated no matter where in the universe you arrived. And since you survived the transfer at all without blowing up Destiny, you would never have risked blowing up Earth.”

“You’ve had a team working on it?” Young asked quietly in the space left by the terrible inference and Rush’s silence. “Ever since?”

McKay nodded emphatically. “Yes.”

Young looked up the table at O’Neill. “Rush had a few minutes. He chose to make the call that didn’t risk the destruction of an inhabited planet. Even if it later turned out he was wrong, that was his call to make, and with the information at his disposal...” he shrugged. “It doesn’t seem like a bad one to me.”

“Are you going to deny that the first thing he did on board was try to take over control by claiming that General O’Neill put him in charge?”

O’Neill snorted. “‘General’ O’Neill, you know that never gets old.” His scalpel like gaze fell on Rush and cut him. “What do you say to that?”

“You  _ did _ .” Rush produced all the startled innocence he had in him. If he forgot the penalty of losing he could almost enjoy this game. “You told me to bring them home. I took that to mean that you were expecting me to be responsible for the mission. Essentially, to be in charge. Was that not what you meant?”

O’Neill raised his eyebrows at Young, who leaned forward and made a gesture of surrender with both hands. “I don’t know, sir. I was unconscious at the time. When I got back, Scott was in command as per regulations, and Rush was busy fixing the air. So if there was some kind of misunderstanding, it got corrected fast.”

And how unexpectedly delightful it was to enter this kind of fight too with Young in his corner. He’d never appreciated Young’s stolid reliability as such an asset before. He took a deep, deep breath to try to calm his adrenaline levels down to the point where he was not invisibly shaking beneath the skin and allowed himself to believe that together they might actually be able to pull this off.

Telford shoved that folder aside with a grimace, pulled out a thicker one with the air of getting to the big guns now.

“So I suppose you’re going to deny that you kept the ship’s bridge secret from the rest of the crew so that you could have sole control over its operations? A control you used to send a shuttle full of people to a planet where it was not safe to attempt to land, resulting in the death of Sergeant Hunter Riley. And which you also used to strand me on a derelict spaceship among aliens you had every reason to believe were hostile.”

You see, hope just made everything fucking worse when it collapsed down like a singularity inside him and he had to fight, fight, fight to escape. He bared his teeth, half rose from his seat. “Aliens that were draining Destiny of her power. If I’d have done nothing she’d have been left there as a sucked out husk and we’d all have died in the dark and the cold. You’d have preferred that, would you? I made the right choice. The only choice.”

“Tell that to Riley,” said Telford.

Rush let himself fall back into his seat, covered his face. They would never let him alone about this, neither the outer voices nor the inner. He slid a sidelong glance at Young in time to catch the flinch, the way the man’s hands curled around each other like he was trying to hide them from himself. No one had exactly missed the suspicious timing of Riley’s death and Young’s final collapse.

He shouldn’t have come here. Even if he cast doubt on every specific instance, it all mounted up. He shouldn’t have trusted anyone to defend him against this. Not himself, whose works inevitably turned to bitterness and ashes in his mouth, and not poor, useless Young, whose main talent was the ability to absorb the universe’s misery and never quite figure out when he’d had enough.

He forced the words out of a constricted throat. “We were desperate for food, and I was alone and very tired, and I made a mistake. I don’t deny that.”

The hush seemed to extend forever, and then O’Neill said, “Here’s a thought. Maybe you wouldn’t have been so tired or alone if you hadn’t kept control of the ship all to yourself. I presume you’re not denying that either?”

He’d lost. After all this time of playing the game he’d gone against his own instincts to take a gamble on trust, and he’d lost. His famous, superior brain had let him down and now he couldn’t think what to say.

“That was my fault, sir.”

Rush’s head snapped up in time to catch the incredulous looks all around the table, as Young went on quite calmly. “The bridge was an incredibly complicated set up. Rush couldn’t trust me to keep a rein on my personnel - to stop them fiddling and potentially blowing us up - until he’d worked out how to use the tech safely.”

“ _ He _ couldn’t trust _ you _ ?” O’Neill cocked his head as though he’d heard it all now.

“No sir. I was a mess at that point, you know that.”

Rush’s hopelessness transmuted suddenly into something lighter and angrier. This was Young’s plan? To throw himself on the sword instead? How utterly fucking like him. It could not be allowed.

Telford was sitting up straighter too, trying not to smile. “ _ Everyone _ knows that, Everett.” He turned to O’Neill with a look that attempted to be concerned rather than triumphant, but didn’t quite make it. “Which is why I believe they should both be replaced, now we have the means to do so.”

Rush opened his mouth to give the ungrateful traitor a piece of his mind, and Young kicked the leg of his chair again, startling him. Oh yeah, trust. He kept forgetting. He subsided while Young leaned forward to re-engage the General’s attention.

“Pretty much all the problems we’ve had with Rush have been down to the fact that I was not up to the job, and he knew it. If you recall, sir, I turned it down. I knew I was in a bad place at the time and a mission of this magnitude deserved better.”

_ That  _ was why Young had turned it down? Not because he didn’t want it, but because he wanted it to succeed so much he thought it ought to have the best? The back of Rush’s mind was a whirl of confusion and realization and his feelings were... God he didn’t know what his feelings were doing but he was absolutely certain he didn’t like it.

“I do recall that,” O’Neill looked genuinely interested, puzzled but curious. “Are you still asking to be replaced?”

“No sir. You believed me then when I said I couldn’t do it. I’m asking you to believe me now when I say that I can.”

The General shook his head. “This is not a hearing about you, Colonel.” And Rush, who had snapped his gaze over there specifically to see it, caught Telford smothering a look of thunderous disappointment. Maybe this one wasn’t, but that had obviously been where Telford intended to go next.

“No sir.” Young went on. “But I wanted to lay the groundwork, so to speak. So you would know what I meant when I said that while I was falling apart it was Rush who held the ship together. Now I’m back, I gotta say that without Rush we wouldn’t have made it at all.”

Rush breathed in hard, focused every last iota of his willpower on holding himself together. That, he had not expected to hear in this lifetime, or at all. It hit him like a shock rod and threatened to stop the heart in his chest.

“He got to you somehow,” Telford scoffed, and drew another folder out of his pile. “Have you forgotten that he  _ lead a mutiny _ against you? Why would you talk about him now like he’s some kind of hero?”

O’Neill’s eyebrows met his hairline in shock. “Mutiny? Seems there’s a lot you haven’t bothered reporting to me, Everett.”

Camile, who was obviously not as good at all this politicking as she thought, caught Rush’s eye from across the table as she tried to dissolve into her seat.

“There was no ‘mutiny,’ sir. The behavior of all of the military personnel on Destiny has been impeccable from the start. The civilians however did make their displeasure known. I can’t blame them for that. Like I said, I was a mess.” Young leaned back in his chair, looking serious and certain and determined to do the right thing. “But that’s long over. I’m doing better these days, the ship is in due order, and as a crew we are finally all on the same page.”

Rush had always thought that he had a strong stomach for risks, but he wouldn’t have taken this one – throwing himself on the General’s mercy, confident that he’d be caught. That was not for him.

O’Neill looked like he’d heard the thought, he looked Rush straight in the face. “So you trust Colonel Young well enough to work with him now, do you?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” Rush snapped, still having a hard time keeping his composure, scared and angry and, underneath it, unmoored from all his emotional supports. “Believe me when I say no one else in the universe could have made me attend this farce.”

The general laughed. “Right. Because you don’t acknowledge my authority or Homeworld Command’s or the IOA’s, or the seriousness of the charges that have been brought against you by Colonel Telford?”

“I have work to be done the importance of which supersedes the petty concerns of trumped up little bureaucrats and jealous so called ’friends’ who--”

“Rush!”

Young called him to heel and Rush went. He fucking went. He sat down, he shut up.  _ Just don’t _ , he told himself, refusing to hate himself for that.  _ Just...  ** don’t ** . _

He glared at O’Neill and was probably fortunate that O’Neill wasn’t looking at him anymore. O’Neill was looking at Young.

“And you trust  _ him _ ?”

Young took his own sweet time looking for words. “Let me put it this way,” he said at last, slow and sure and quiet. “I uh, I heard that when you first met Dr. Jackson, you thought he was a useless bleeding-heart nerd who ought to choke on his own allergies and good riddance.”

“Good times,” O’Neill smiled, reminiscing.

“And now you’d rather have him than a battalion? Well, Rush is my Jackson. I thought he was a two faced backstabbing son of a bitch at first, but now I’ll go to the wall for him, sir. If I have to.”

To his shame, Rush had to get up from the table properly then, so he could face the corner and conceal the huge effort he was making not to burst into tears. There was a terrible hot silence behind him and then O’Neill said, “Well, I think this is a good time to have a five minute break. Coffee - coffee’s what we all need. And also maybe a convenient alien invasion. I’ll see if I can order one up.”

A sound of chairs scraping, and the door. Footsteps. Rush, with his fist pressed to his mouth, did not move until a hand came down between his shoulder blades, just resting there, warm and solid, holding in his hammering heart.

“You okay?”

“Laying it on a little thick weren’t you?” Rush’s voice was roughened around the edges by his sandpaper throat. He was ashamed of it. He was ashamed of so many things, but chiefly of how much he wished, he wished...

“It was true.”

After the body swap and the dreams, Rush had known he was wrong. Like a good scientist, he had dropped his incorrect conception of the universe wholesale, without trying to cling on to error, but he had had nothing with which to replace the hatred, the contempt that had been the center of his psyche for so long. That hollow had been empty for the past weeks, an echoing chamber made ready for a fullness that had not yet come.

But now... now his vapor of emotions found a nucleation site in the reassuring touch that lay just above his heart, and he felt it all coalesce within. It filled him to the brim with a clear certainty that was nothing at all like the certainty he had felt for Gloria - but only because this time... this time it belonged to Young.

“I wanted the same thing, you know.” Rush managed, squeezing the words thin as wire through his teeth. “For us to be like Cassidy and Sundance. Only I’m afraid we... I think we left it too late. I think...”

“It’s gonna be fine.”

Somehow having got the words out made it easier, lighter to turn, with a kind of incredulous joy hurtling out of the anguish like it was the other side of the coin. “Oh yes, because  _ you _ have so much experience of ‘fine.’”

“Then maybe I’m owed.” Young shook his borrowed head, and Rush had a flash of desperately, desperately wanting to be back home. He was sick to the back teeth of this body hopping. He yearned for their own.

But he couldn’t say that here where he’d already revealed too much. He was off balance, with the multiverse reshaped yet again beneath his feet. He needed peace and safety to think this through, to find out who he still was, and he would never get that here. In the mean time he would have to make do with lesser stimulants. “And maybe I’m owed coffee.”

Young smiled, took the change of subject gracefully. “Coffee sounds good.”

Pressing a camouflaged uniform cuff to his eyes, Rush straightened himself up and avoided Young’s concerned gaze, so he would not have to have any more of this conversation right now. Instead, he walked out into the stares. He grabbed coffee and a cookie, stuffed the biscuit into his mouth as he stood next to McKay, hoping it would give him an excuse not to speak.

After watching him in silence for a while, McKay said, uncomfortably, “Listen, I’m sorry. The body transference? It was meant to be for a short test period only. Proof of concept, you know? The truth is that, despite all the hard sell - and I must admit it’s flattering to be asked - I haven’t even agreed to another extended mission out in the depths of God knows where. And if I  _ had _ agreed, I think I would have to stipulate that I should not be asked to work with Colonel Telford on this. I mean is it me or does he seem a little... mendacious to you? And I say that as someone who is now more intimately acquainted with the man than I’d ever wanted to be, thank you.”

Feeling generous, Rush swallowed his cookie, seized McKay’s napkin and wrote down the chair equations there, without even introducing a deliberate mistake to make sure he was paying attention. “This should solve that problem at least.”

Another five minutes, and Rush’s soul was a battleground between light and dark, terribly Biblical and distressing. He was thankful to go back in again and take his seat, where he pretended very hard that he was not at all embarrassed. Then O’Neill cleared his throat and he didn’t have space for embarrassment under the flood of fear.

“Well,” said the General slowly, “It’s my impression that even among Stargate missions, which have a notorious tendency to become... interesting, Destiny’s crew appears to have taken  _ complicated _ to a whole new level. But as my old man used to say ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.’ Whatever’s gone on in the past, you both seem to be working together okay now. Judging from the shitstorm Ms. Wray’s colleagues have been kicking up on your behalf, you also have her convinced. I’m not going to break a thing that’s finally started doing what it should. So the lot of you are free to go.”

“Sir!” Telford protested, sounding disgusted as well as disappointed.

“Uh uh,” O’Neill waggled a finger at him again. “You two didn’t even manage to fix each other. What makes you think  _ you’d _ do any better? Go on, shoo. It’s late afternoon. I need my nap. And Dr. Rush?”

Rush stopped in the act of passing through the door, still with that nagging doubt that he would be snatched at the last moment and wholly thrown into the dark.

“I hope not to see you here again.”

“Oh believe me, you can’t possibly hope for it more than I do.” He strolled the two paces out of the General’s eye-line, then broke and sprinted all the way back to the stones without a backward glance.

Chloe had scrambled to her feet, hearing his running feet in the corridor, and in a fit of relief and happiness, he caught her up by the elbows and swung her in a circle around him. She laughed as he put her down. “I gather it went well?”

“Ah, ma wee hen.” The words came out by themselves, embarrassingly charged with primal truth, “Could not be better. Home with us now.”

“You’re not waiting for the Colonel?”

He probably should, he knew that. Young would think he was owed some words of consideration or gesture of gratitude, and Rush would not have denied that. But dithering in the stones room on this unimportant little ball of rock did not seem enough. Rush would think of something better when he had time, when he was in his own place. Besides, he badly wanted to be gone.

“He’ll catch up soon enough. Come on.”


	21. Chapter 21

Rush took a long, luxurious time to appreciate being back. Before anything, he let himself be aware of the blood and the sensory fibers that connected all the extremities of his body to the core. It was good to settle back into this form and pause for a moment to appreciate how well it fitted, how bright was the sleet of sensation from his fingertips and the soles of his feet and the myriad little flickers of fabric from his clothes. In this state of gratitude it was even pleasant to feel again the throb from his knee, to bend it and know that it was healing.

He focused outwards, smelled for a moment the rust and ozone and warm human fug of recycled air. That scent was becoming less strong the more corridors they opened but it still smelled like home. When he opened his eyes, it was a benediction to see that he was standing in the crowded stones room. Chloe was hugging Scott by the door, Greer looking on in tolerant amusement from under his carapace of armor and explosives.

As he was stretching his hands and rolling his shoulders, Young caught him up. With a more than scientific interest, he watched the moment when the stranger drained away from behind Young’s eyes and the Colonel returned. When Young opened his eyes, a part of Rush that had been nagging away in the back of his mind fell silent in relief, and he had to laugh at himself and accept that he was somewhat entangled. It seemed he hadn’t quite believed the operation had been a success until he’d been assured of Young’s safe return too.

The first thing Young did was catch his eye. That fact gave him an inappropriate amount of pride.

“Okay?”

He couldn’t help the smile, wasn’t sure if he wanted to help it, in fact. This outcome deserved to be celebrated. “Never better.”

Young nodded. “’Kay,” and stood. He turned his head to look at Scott, “Any trouble with our guests?” and the blue and gold lights of Destiny slid diagonally across his cheekbone and jaw, the heavy strength of his throat and the edge of his easy, radiant grin, and Rush thought _Oh_.

He took a step back, as if that would somehow outpace the wave of awakening that was sliding past his skin, sleek as warm oil. _Oh God._

He’d _appreciated_ Young’s body before, of course. _Liked_ (when he wasn’t hating) the brutal competency of it. Found many things to admire from an aesthetic point of view. But... his heart raced, the palms of his hands and his lips prickled. Never this. Never this fucking magnetic urge to touch and taste and bite and hold down.

The memory of their fight aboard that spacecraft recurred. What would have happened then if he’d kissed Young instead of headbutting him? Well, he hadn’t wanted to at the time, had he, but now... He swallowed, made a hasty retreat out of the door, because now he was having a hard time stopping himself from doing it right here and that... nobody wanted that.

_Oh fuck._

Literally, apparently.

It never finished, did it? The upturning of everything he had once assumed. He let himself go to ground again, following his feet back to the shed where his half constructed sarcophagus lay with its guts exposed to his examination. It seemed an appropriate enough place. There he let his mind and hands get on with the jigsaw puzzle of assemblage while on a deeper level his semi-verbal subconscious grappled with one more unexpected revelation.

Why was it unexpected, exactly? This very same thing had happened to him when Gloria’s hoity-toity friends had been scoffing at his accent, and she told them she liked it, came to sit at his solitary table, squeezing in to the bench beside him because he had never needed to find a second chair. Though he had admired her from a distance before, it was only then that he had suddenly become aware of the soft gold of her hair and the rise and fall of the wonder of her breasts.

It had happened too when Mandy concealed the existence of the bridge for him, when he had thought he could trust her totally with his life and his secrets, though it had later turned out that that was not true.

Perhaps the knowledge that he could rely on someone to defend his dreams and dignity was what it took for him to want... to want to be intimate with them. It didn’t seem a bad metric, on the whole. He could even approve of the rational basis of his desires. But he had always assumed...

His hands fitted together a capacitor and a squingy, and snapped the whole assemblage into place in the power-flow regulation subsystem of the box. There didn’t appear to be a power source, so he suspected the device would have to be rigged into the solar collectors. Not ideal, given that people’s propensity to get fatally injured could not be confined to recharging times, but with the stasis tubes they could make do.

Pushing his hair back from his face gave him a ghost sensation of what it had felt like to touch Young’s, and his thoughts were scattered once again by want, insistent and determined, which he turned away from angrily. He would not allow the inside of his own head to dictate to him like this. Not until he’d thought it through. Not until he knew he would be happy with his choices. Not until he knew he could live with himself, afterwards.

Given the rarity of his attractions and the fact that both times they had been to women, he had always assumed that he was some dilatory version of straight. Perhaps, on the evidence provided, it had not been irrational to think that at the time but. Well. Now it seemed clear he had been wrong about that too.

Did it matter?

Perhaps not in the strict sense of definitions. If he was sporadically bisexual instead of sporadically heterosexual, that hardly seemed an issue of great moment. He had presumably been whatever he was all his life before he discovered it, so he had not _changed_ , he had simply become less ill-informed. Which was, of course, a good thing.

But in terms of his relationship with Young, it mattered immensely. What did he even want? In the long term, what was it exactly that he was hoping for with the man? A deep and friendly partnership was one thing, and he’d only just begun to appreciate the paradoxically yearned for and yet unexpected delight of that, but did he really want to take it further and become lovers? Young did not have a good track record in that regard, arriving on board in the wreckage of two relationships at once.

Though, to be fair, both of _Young’s_ partners remained _alive,_ and one at least of them seemed still fond of him. So possibly Young would be taking the greater risk there. But if all their relationships ended in divorce or death, what kind of a prospect was it? Why would he even entertain the notion, now that they had the possibility of something less risky, platonic and perfect like a carefree ideal from the films?

Rush thought of that touch, back on Earth, and how it had simultaneously taken him apart and made him solid again. He tried not to think of all their fights, how sure and inexorable Young had been and how it might feel to be that overwhelmed in another context.

People would know. Nothing remained a secret here on Destiny for long. He didn’t want them thinking that Young had somehow won. But they might not think it at all. They might think ‘oh God, the pair of them together, there’ll be no stopping them now.’ And he wouldn’t object to that.

He sighed and raised a piece of polished casing to fit it to the side of the box. Caught sight of his face, looking flushed and flustered and a little wild before he bolted it firmly down. Maybe he was getting ahead of himself. After all, Young had not raised the possibility of such a relationship, though he must...

The moment in the simulation recurred, when he had seen himself through Young’s eyes and realized he was a stunner. Young probably did want this, or could be made to. But he’d never said anything, had left it up to Rush to decide, which was fucking lucky because Rush didn’t think he’d take well to being pursued.

So what _did_ Rush want? To risk everything they’d just achieved on one huge final gamble for an uncertain reward? Or to have some fucking self-control for once and try to just enjoy what he’d got before he went too far as usual and wrecked it?

Patting the sarcophagus reassuringly, as though it was a friendly horse, he had to admit he was building this primarily for Young. At first it had been a bribe, then a means to give him Lieutenant Johansen back, so that he would be so distracted and grateful he would leave Rush the fuck alone. It was no longer either of those things. Definitely not the second. But what it was now, whether it was a thank you present or a courting gift, he had not a bloody clue.

 

* * *

 

Young closed his eyes against the blue glare of the virtual console. After a few seconds he opened them again, but it was pointless. The Ancient letters were swimming together on the screen, and the vocabulary which he had known by heart a week ago looked alien and incomprehensible to him now. He wasn’t going to make any more progress tonight, that much was clear. He needed to get his glasses back from Rush; his eyes just couldn’t take this kind of abuse. But that was only a small part of the problem. The real culprit was his fucking brain, and he wasn’t going to fix that with corrective lenses. What had started out as a fun challenge with Rush’s brain had turned into an uphill slog with his own, but he wasn’t giving up. He was going to learn Ancient if it killed him. Just… not right this minute.

He heaved a sigh and stretched himself out full length on his couch. “Thanks,” he murmured into the quiet room, “I’m done now.”

He had ceased to feel strange, talking to the ship. She made it obvious enough that she was always listening. Case in point - the virtual console which had been hovering above the couch a moment ago had just winked out of existence.

With that distraction out of his way, Young’s thoughts drifted lazily and without much conviction toward his bed. It was getting late, and his body required a lot more sleep than Rush’s had. But he had let himself get into bad habits. Sleep felt like such a waste of time. So, prompted by some stubborn echo of Rush’s behavioral patterns, he remained on the couch and set his mind to work on something more profitable.

Predictably, his mind decided to focus on its favorite subject. He made a half-hearted effort to redirect it, but with little hope of success. The thought of Rush was always hovering in the shadows like a ghost, waiting for the right moment to attract his attention. Yes, _very_ like a ghost, because Young hadn’t seen its flesh-and-blood counterpart for nearly forty-eight hours. Not in the mess, not on the bridge, and no chance encounters in the halls. Nothing. Not since they had returned from Earth in a mutual haze of joy and relief. Not since that last, complicated smile Rush had sent him across the table before excusing himself from the stones room.

So why was Rush avoiding him _this_ time? Young couldn’t think of any justification for it. The meeting with General O’Neill could not possibly have gone better. Rush’s position on Destiny had not only been secured, but strengthened. He had proven his competency and had obviously enjoyed rubbing McKay’s and Telford’s noses in it. And he had clearly been touched by Young’s defense of him.

His reaction… Young would never forget it. He had seen Rush with his defenses lowered before, but not like that. Not under such positive circumstances. Rush’s broken honesty had flowed like cool water, and Young had felt cleansed by it. The last clinging traces of dust from that now-distant planet - that desolate backdrop to the worst of his sins - had been washed away. Young only wished it had been Rush’s own eyes glistening with unshed tears and Rush’s own voice turned husky with emotion. He wanted Rush, in his own body, to look at him like that. Just _once_. He wanted to have that memory to treasure.

Still, no point in getting greedy. Young had already been given so much more than he’d ever hoped for. Against all odds - almost against their very natures - he and Rush had turned a long history of mutual antagonism into a friendship. That was a thought worth savoring.

He smiled at the memory of Rush’s reference to _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_. Had Rush guessed that it was one of Young’s favorite movies? Or did it hold some significance for him, too? It didn’t really strike Young as the sort of film Rush would enjoy. He didn’t quite see how the setting, the gunfights, and the irreverent tone would appeal to him. And yet Rush knew something about negotiating wild terrain. He knew something about outlaws and shootouts and facing down impossible odds. Hell, he practically looked like an extra from an old Western with his long hair and vest and boots and studded belt. All he needed to complete the picture was a pair of spurs and a ten gallon hat.

Then Young’s smile faded as another thought dawned on him. Young had been a toddler when _Butch Cassidy_ was released, but Rush… Rush had been old enough to see it in the theater. And Rush had been a lonely boy, bullied and friendless. Butch and Sundance’s friendship must have left a powerful impression on him. Even at that young age, he’d known what it felt like to be outcast and hunted. What he hadn’t known was what it felt like to have someone in his corner. Someone to fight at his side. Someone to die at his side, if it came to that. _Of course_ the film was important to him. It represented something he had wanted for most of his life.

Young closed his eyes and wondered how many shattering insights a mind could take within a brief period of time before it broke along its fault lines. He had to be getting close by now. Already, his perception of Rush had altered so significantly in the past three weeks that it was scarcely recognizable anymore. Young was enchanted and fascinated and enamored, but also, just… exhausted. Maybe he should think about going to bed after all.

There was a soft huff of laughter from somewhere in the vicinity of the other couch. Then a familiar, mild tenor voice said, “You never really did learn how to actually _relax_ on your off time, did you, sir?”

Every muscle in Young’s body went rigid. His breath caught in his lungs and his heart stuttered. Oh god. He knew that voice. He knew it, but it was impossible. It was _impossible_.

“It’s funny, ‘cause you don’t really give the impression of being all wound up tight,” his visitor continued in a thoughtful tone.

Young opened his eyes. Stared at the ceiling. He couldn’t bring himself to turn his head, not quite yet. He didn’t want to face this from a vulnerable position. Visitations from the afterlife should be met head-on, he felt. So, with a monumental effort, he broke through his shock-induced paralysis and slowly sat up. Only then did he turn to face the figure occupying the other couch.

Sergeant Hunter Riley stared back at him. He was seated on the edge of the couch, back straight and hands on his knees. His attitude was both alert and respectful, but there was something in his expression - a knowing look, as if he had picked apart Young’s soul and examined it bit by broken bit - that didn’t _quite_ sit right on his features. It was eerie and maddening and heartrending. Young felt lightheaded; his vision swam.

“Breathe,” Riley reminded him gently.

Young sucked in a deep breath. _Shit_.

“Much better.”

“Fuck you,” Young gasped. “I don’t have time to go crazy right now.” He dropped his face into his hands and rubbed at his eyes, groaning.

“Is there ever a good time to go crazy?” Riley asked. It sounded like a rhetorical question, so Young felt justified in ignoring it.

Oh, he could _not_ handle this right now. Guilt flowing like poison through his veins, a weight like a boulder in the pit of his stomach, the threat of lunacy hanging over his head. Stones crumbling to dust under his feet, falling away until he was dangling over an abyss. He’d been here before, after Riley’s death. He’d been so close to the edge already, and then the ship had given him that last little push into mental collapse. If not for Rush, Destiny would probably have succeeded in...

_Oh_.

Young lifted his head from his hands and met Riley’s eyes. Anger pulsed, hot and molten and deeply welcome after that momentary lapse into hollow darkness, as he examined the dead Staff Sergeant critically. Everything looked right, at least on the surface. But there was still just that niggling sense of something being _off_ about him. Something about his eyes. They were just a little too discerning. That was not the gaze of a petty officer looking at his commander.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Young said.

Riley smiled at that. “What _do_ you believe in?”

“Starships that like to fuck with my head, for one.”

Riley ducked his head and laughed softly. When he looked up again, his expression was approving.

Young’s hands curled into fists in his lap. He counted to ten in his head, trying to clear away the rage that fogged it. “That’s who you are, isn’t it? You’re Destiny.”

Riley didn’t bother to deny it.

“So what is this about?” Young growled. “Was I getting a little too happy, so you decided to take me down a few pegs? Or do you just do this for fun?”

Now Riley looked puzzled. He tilted his head to one side and his brows drew together in a slight frown. He looked younger than his thirty years. There was still something very boyish about him, something that used to put others at ease. He had always given the impression that he was not a threat, although he had been as capable as any other soldier. Young hated Destiny for wearing Riley’s form, and he hated himself for experiencing a flicker of achy, guilt-ridden joy at the sight of him alive and well.

“I thought it was about time we talked face-to-face,” Riley said, still looking confused.

“And this is how you decided to do it?” Young sputtered. “As a _dead_ man?”

“As someone you cared about,” Riley said. “Someone you lost.” He was now eyeing Young with a subtle air of disappointment, as if he felt Young was being abnormally obtuse.

Young pressed his lips together and focused on reining in his temper. He was missing something, but so, he felt, was Riley. Destiny. Whomever he was dealing with here. Letting his fear and anger take over would not help either of them, and might prompt the ship to put him through another round of torture sessions from which Rush would have to rescue him.

Dealing with cryptic pieces of Ancient tech was more Rush’s specialty than Young’s. So what would Rush do in this situation? For that matter, what did Rush usually do when presented with something he did not understand?

Young already knew the answer to that question. He recalled the look on Rush’s face just after Young had released him from his watery prison aboard the blue aliens’ ship. Young had been wearing the form of one of the aliens, and in Rush’s place, Young probably wouldn’t have hesitated before attacking - not after being imprisoned and mindfucked by the spindly blue bastards. But Rush had paused to ask questions.

_‘Why did you do that? You want to help me?’_

Young looked across at Riley, who wore a thoughtful expression. Young wondered if the AI was reading his mind even now, and if so, what he… she… _it_ made of his thoughts.

Riley stirred restlessly and clasped his hands together in his lap. “You’re scared,” he commented, but he sounded somewhat uncertain on this point, as if the idea was so preposterous that he couldn’t wrap his head around it.

Young smiled grimly at that. “Yeah, well. Can you really blame me?”

Apparently, Riley could. He was gazing at Young with an unmistakable look of reproach. His expressive eyes conveyed a mixture of perplexity and hurt, tugging on Young’s too-sensitive heart.

_I didn’t know space ships could get their feelings hurt_ , mused Young, _but it figures that I’d be the one to manage it._

“All I’ve ever done,” Riley said very patiently, “is try to help you.”

Young clamped his lips shut over his automatic, indignant response. _Alien AI here_ , he reminded himself. _It doesn’t think the way you do._ He drew in a deep breath, let it out very slowly, and then he met Riley’s eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. What about the no-win scenario? How exactly was that supposed to help me? I watched my crew die three times. _I_ died three times. Nothing I tried changed anything. It was a test I couldn’t pass, and I--”

“It wasn’t a test.”

Young blinked, his train of thought completely derailed. No, it _had_ to have been a test. Destiny had been evaluating his leadership ability, right? There was no other logical explanation for it. Not unless Destiny really _had_ purposefully tortured him for the sheer fun of it.

“It was a lesson,” Riley said.

“A lesson,” Young echoed.

Riley nodded slowly. His eyes left Young’s and darted around the room absently, as if he needed a few moments to organize his thoughts. “You were on the verge of collapse,” he murmured after a moment. “You nearly lost this ship to the Lucian Alliance. You lost your unborn child. You lost me.”

“Not you,” Young corrected sharply. “I lost the _real_ Riley.”

Riley accepted this distinction with a nod. “You lost Sergeant Riley. It was all too much for you. You internalized it all and let it grind you into the deck. You had no detachment, no ability to compartmentalize your emotions. I didn’t know what to do with you.”

Young let out a breath that might have been a wry laugh, or the prelude to a sob. “So you made me live through my worst fears because you thought that would teach me to… to _compartmentalize_? Was _that_ the lesson?”

“No,” Riley whispered, shaking his head.

“Then _what_?” Young demanded, leaning forward in his seat. “What were you trying to teach me?”

“That it wasn’t your _fault,_ ” Riley said earnestly. He lifted his hands as if to ward Young off. “Not all of it. You can’t always save everyone, and you can’t let that paralyze you.”

They stared at each other across the coffee table for several interminable minutes. Then all the tension went out of Young and he slumped forward, burying his face in his hands. Oh _god_. His mind went back to those dark few days when the simulation had driven him to the brink of madness. It had not been torture, not even a test, but a literal no-win scenario designed to teach him that there were some things he could not control. Some catastrophes that he could not avert. And he was meant to find that _comforting_.

Young let out a broken laugh. “I think… I think you still have a few things to learn about human psychology,” he gasped.

“Evidently,” Riley said in a doubtful tone.

Young rubbed at his eyes and sighed. He was far from feeling reconciled to what Destiny had put him through, but, well… it was nice to know it had been done with the best intent. That counted for something.

When he lifted his head, he found Riley staring pensively at something behind Young’s left shoulder. He turned, following Riley’s gaze, and spotted Rush’s glasses sitting innocently atop a stack of paper on his desk. There was little enough there to capture Riley’s interest. Just a pair of wire frames, mismatched temples (one plastic, the other fashioned from a twist of black wire) and scratched lenses reflecting the rippling starlight. They had been broken and mended several times over, but they were still functional. Still strong, just like their owner. Shit. Now Young was getting sentimental over a pair of _glasses_. He looked back at Riley, who now wore a vaguely pleased expression.

The skin at the nape of Young’s neck prickled with unease. He wasn’t sure where the feeling originated from, but experience told him not to ignore it. “Yeah, I need to give those back,” he said casually.

“The two of you seem to be getting along better now,” Riley said, still eyeing Rush’s glasses. And oh no, that expression wasn’t just pleased. It was downright _smug_.

Young’s unease transformed into suspicion. Riley just looked too damn satisfied with himself for comfort. As if he were watching the pieces of some nefarious plot click into place. “That’s right,” Young said guardedly. “Turns out walking a mile in someone else’s boots works as well as they say.”

Riley met Young’s eyes and lifted his chin in quiet triumph. “I understand your psychology better than you think,” he said, and a chill ran down Young’s spine.

“Please,” Young groaned, _“please_ tell me you didn’t somehow orchestrate this whole--” he failed to find a word sufficient to describe the full scale of the clusterfuck he and Rush had recently gone through, so he made a helpless gesture with both hands to indicate switching places, “--just to fix my relationship with Rush?”

Riley looked reassuringly horrified by this suggestion. “Of course not,” he said. “That was pure human error. Why would I deliberately compromise two of the most important members of my crew? Even if I could have pulled it off, I wouldn’t have tried. The risks far outweighed the reward.”

That sounded quite logical and possibly shouldn’t have needed explaining, but there was really no cause for the AI to take offense. Young was only just beginning to understand how _Rush’s_ mind worked; he couldn’t possibly be expected to predict Destiny’s behavior or grasp her motivations.

Antsy with relief,Young pushed himself to his feet and made his way to his desk. He was aware of Riley’s eyes on him as he picked up Rush’s glasses and made a minute adjustment to the makeshift wire temple. “Of course,” he said without looking up from his task, “that makes sense.”

That was apparently enough to mollify Riley. His voice was pleasant again as he said, “Yeah. Still, I do believe in making the best of a bad situation. When life gives you lemons, you know?”

Alien AIs really should not be allowed to spout Earth clichés, Young thought. Not even using the folksy tones of a dead farm boy. _Especially_ not using the folksy tones of a dead farm boy. In an effort to distract himself from the eeriness of conversing with this not-quite-convincing version of Riley, Young wondered how Rush’s views on lemons compared to his sage advice about the proper handling of stones. Would he advocate swallowing them, or chucking them back? Which reminded Young - he still needed to ask Rush about that dream.

And that was when the ponderous workings of his subconscious finally caught up to the conversation and solidified into a sudden realization. “The dreams,” he murmured, meeting Riley’s eyes across the room. “They weren’t a byproduct of the transfer. That was _you_.”

Riley inclined his head in simple acknowledgement.

“Jesus,” Young breathed. Really, he shouldn’t be shocked. That was perfectly in character for Destiny, who could look into their heads and make them experience any simulated reality that she chose. It would be easy for her to take one person’s memories and make another person live through them. But dear god, the _violation_ of it. Young had never felt quite so naked and vulnerable. “Those memories contained some very intimate details,” he protested. “I don’t like knowing that I invaded Rush’s privacy against my will. And I don’t even want to know what was in _his_ dreams.”

“But just think about what you’ve learned,” Riley pointed out. “Consider the benefits of knowing so much about each other. That’s what made your friendship possible.”

Young carefully set Rush’s glasses aside. His hands were not quite steady at the moment, and he was afraid of snapping the delicate temple wire if he toyed with it any further. “I get that,” he said, “but the ends don’t always justify the means.”

Riley stared blankly at him. “Why not?”

Young barely managed to suppress a smile at that terrifying - yet oddly endearing - question. _Oh, boy. I bet you and Rush get on like a house afire_. God save him from inquisitive starships and the morally-challenged scientists who loved them.

“I think that might be a conversation for another time,” he said tactfully.

Riley’s confusion gave way to concern. “You’re tired,” he observed quietly.

“And overwhelmed,” Young admitted. “I need time to process all this.”

“I’ll leave you to it then.” Riley rose to his feet and began to smooth the wrinkles out of the front of his uniform. Why this was necessary, Young couldn’t guess. Presumably Riley could wink out of existence at any moment; he didn’t need to make a show of getting ready to leave. Unless he was stalling, of course. He had the look of a man who had more to say, and wasn’t sure how to say it.

“Something bothering you?” Young asked him.

Riley let his hands drop to his sides and offered Young a wan smile that was both charming and heartbreakingly familiar. “I just… I’m not sure why you still feel… worried? Unsettled? I don’t know the right word, but your thoughts get very complicated when you think about Rush. You were doing it before I arrived.”

So _that’s_ why the AI had chosen this particular evening to drop by. Young had wondered about the timing. If Destiny had just wanted to make friends with him, she could have done so earlier - preferably four years earlier, when her input would have been especially useful. But it made sense that, like so many things in Young’s life recently, this visit was really about Rush.

His smile was an echo of Riley’s - small and weary and barely amused at some minor piece of folly. In this case the folly was his own, and it wasn’t something he knew how to quash. It was a hunger of the skin. It was a restlessness of the spirit. It was fleeting explosions of thought like fireworks against a backdrop of infinite sky. _How do you explain desire to a starship?_

Young ran his fingers through his tousled curls and thought of long, feathery strands. If he concentrated, he could almost feel that soft sleekness under his fingertips. If he closed his eyes and imagined--

“There, that’s what I mean,” Riley murmured.

Young laughed softly and opened his eyes. “The word you’re looking for is ‘unsatisfied,’” he said. “And I’m afraid it’s just a part of human nature.”


	22. Chapter 22

Rush knocked harder than he had meant to on the shiny patch of the door jamb outside Young’s room, where other knuckles than his had begun to rub the patina off the metal.

“Come in,” said Young, and as Rush did, he looked up. His resting expression went through a series of small changes that made it seem warmer, friendlier. Welcoming, Rush thought, and wondered why he’d stayed away so long.

His cost benefit analysis had been clear. Nothing substantial was to be gained by disturbing the status quo. He had now the partnership for which he had hoped for a very long time, and pushing for something more ran every risk of losing it. It was therefore only rational to quash these merely animal desires and hope that, repressed, they would not simply smolder on underground to break out in forest fires elsewhere at the most inconvenient times.

Mixed metaphors. This was what he had come to.

“Rush,” Young rolled his name around in his mouth like it tasted good, and he was smiling now, standing up, as you did to greet an important person, or someone you’re glad to see, after a long time apart. “You’ve been busy?”

He didn’t already know? He hadn’t had Eli track Rush down, been watching over the kino to make sure Rush wasn’t up to something nefarious? Rush cast his startled mind back and realized that in fact the surveillance had stopped long ago. Somewhere along the line, Young had taken a deliberate decision to trust him, at least a little. And he... He breathed in, let the past go - again - well he found himself touched by that, and fiercely moved to prove he could deserve it.

“As always.” He shrugged, trying to feign light-heartedness, while inside his chest the decision he thought he had made cracked apart along a thousand faults and shattered.

Fuck it. Rush prided himself on not being the kind of soft Southern jessie who let fear get in the way of what he wanted. So this course of action was the most inclined to blow up in his face? Didn’t that just make it the most fun?

“I... ah. Well, now I’m back to myself I thought I would finish what I started. Do you care to come and inspect Destiny’s very own working sarcophagus?”

“You finished it?”

So much fucking subtext. Young came out from behind his desk, and part of Rush was glad of that, tracking the movement of his shoulders, the slope of his back as he turned. Rush had it bad, even the shape of the gap between Young’s lowered arms and his waist spoke ratios of perfection that Rush’s fingers itched to explore.

But at the same time, he didn’t like Young coming close enough to grab or hit or throttle him, and he had to hold himself so still, so still, or he would have flinched, new partnership or no.

Bodies, they made everything so complicated.

“Of course I did.” He satisfied the contrary urges to touch Young and to get away from him by turning to lead the man out of his door. Young followed obediently enough and did not attempt to crowd him, and that was good, in one respect. In another, it was too far away.

“It works by a process of demolecularisation and almost instantaneous remolecularisation in a corrected state. The correct state being determined by a body scan of the subject at a microcellular level, an analysis of their DNA, and an extensive database of medical knowledge that is continually being updated and corrected by the ship’s AI. This includes the full buffer pattern of each of Destiny’s crew members taken as they came through the Destiny gate for the first time.”

Young paced along beside him in silence for a long while, but he had enough experience now of how the man’s mind worked to know that Young was actively working through what Rush had said, rather than just ignoring him.

“It unmakes you, and then it remakes you, like a stargate?”

“Yes,” Rush smiled, pleased to have been understood. “But corrected. So if you go into it with a wounded leg, it remakes that leg according to a combination of data about what your leg should be like when it’s healthy. Hence, the reassembled you comes out healed.”

He ushered Young into the storage unit in which he had assembled the box. He had taken down the shelves to give himself room to work, and now the whole thing looked anti-climactic, like a suburban bathroom that the interior decorators had decided would be chic in gray, and where they had installed a very odd, lidded tub.

Rush opened the device up, showed its narrow, coffin-like interior, the grim grey walls broken only by a series of parallel white lights that he believed were purely decorative - or perhaps served to prevent panic when the lid was shut. Normally he preferred the elegance of Ancient design to the opulence of Goa’uld, but this thing that restored lives? He felt it should be a little more showy.

Young looked down into the bed of it with his hands clasped behind his back and a pensive expression. “I’ve always wondered if it’s the same person on both sides of the gate. You know? Whether being torn apart into energy kills you, and the thing that’s made on the other side is someone else. Someone entirely new.”

The evidence that Young had thoughts was still novel enough to startle and charm Rush. As he closed the sarcophagus up again, he had to smile, echoing Young’s hushed tone in approval. It was good to know that the man was aware of the mysteries of the universe through which he so casually wandered, acting as if he owned them.

“Functionally it makes no difference, but philosophically, yes. It’s quite a conundrum. Yet all technologies come with risk, even fire. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t take the risk and call it justified.”

They stood companionably contemplating the possibility of their serial annihilation together, while slowly Rush’s thoughts bent back towards the way Young’s shaggy hair flicked up over the nape of his neck. The little kink of his eyebrows brought a kind of affectionate hilarity out of the depths of Rush’s heart, made him want to smile.

And then the eyebrows twisted and Young stepped back, away, pierced him with a look like a skewer.

“What?”

“You’re not limping any more. Rush--”

Rush wasn’t sure what this was, horror maybe? Accusation? Startled by the hardness in Young’s tone, he defaulted to comfortable defensiveness. “Well, I had to try it didn’t I? After that fiasco with Senator Armstrong, I know better than to show off a piece of equipment before I’m certain that it works.”

“So you _tested it_ on yourself?”

Young closed the distance between them, and Rush knew what that was, that was a threat. He held his ground out of principle and confusion, but his blood hissed in his ears and his heart pounded under his breastbone and all his skin came alive and prickled in something he thought was alarm. He thought it was alarm but he was waiting, eagerly waiting...

“I thought you might prefer that to the alternative--”

The thought of Franklin, poisonous between them, was shattered by the grip of Young’s hand hard around Rush’s elbow. He recoiled automatically, not ready to be touched, but a wave of semi-terrified arousal went over him nevertheless, almost as powerful as his indignation.

“Rush!”

“Oh what? You know perfectly well I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t sure it was safe. So what the fuck have you got to be angry about now?”

The burning coal of Young’s gaze flickered, and then he shut his eyes as if in pain, turned his face aside, his mouth settling into a sullen downward curve.

“What?” Rush insisted again, still hot, exalted and battle-ready. He lifted his hand to shake Young by the shoulder, reconsidered and went with the smaller, shyer voice that told him to curve it carefully around Young’s cheek instead.

Young breathed in sharp and raised his own free hand to cover it. “I’m not angry, Rush. I’m _scared._ There should have been people monitoring this to make sure you were okay. You shouldn’t have done it alone. What if it had gone wrong and no one was here to get you out? What if you were trapped in there, screaming for help and no one could hear? What if you’d _died_? I only just... _We_ only just... and I...”

Oh. Oh bless the boy. Rush’s own anger turned, dizzyingly into a swell of hungry protectiveness that was probably entirely inappropriate. He had not attempted to tear himself out of Young’s grasp, nor had Young moved away from his touch, and an awareness of their close proximity came over him with a rising throb of new sweetness.

One thing Rush was excellent at was escalating things. It scarcely took a thought for him to close the half step that was between them, to lean up and catch Young’s lips between his. Bigger, coarser lips than those of a woman, the scrape of bristle adding unexpected excitement, but they opened to him just as easily with a gasp of surprise and need that made his toes curl.

He pressed in. Young yielded to him with a deep, rumbling groan that he could feel shaking his own lungs, making him catch his breath. Young’s mouth opened to him and he pushed in, driving Young backwards as he got one hand into Young’s hair. It felt so much better now he could touch it with his own hands, and he clutched at it partly in joy and partly in the determination that no one should take this away from him.

Young’s hands, meanwhile, were at his waist, untucking his shirt, pushing inside, warm and solid and strong - oh, he remembered how strong they were - and there was a little frisson of terror to the memories of how they had hurt him, how easily they could hurt him again, but they weren’t, they really weren’t, and the sharpness of the fear was exhilarating, tantalizing, hot as fuck, as he drove Young stumbling until the man’s back hit the nearest wall.

Young’s thumbs traced the outlines of Rush’s shoulder blades gently, as if he marveled at them, and the tenderness of the touch made Rush break off, rest his forehead against Young’s shoulder briefly, trying to ignore a ridiculous press of threatening tears.

“Should we...” Young faltered. Rush looked up. He’d never seen so much startled openness in Young’s expression before. “Is this a good idea?”

Rush couldn’t remember when he had last been this hard. He pushed closer yet, the press of the fabric of his own underwear harsh against his prick. Young’s hips tilted up into his almost involuntarily, the pressure rough and dry and almost painful and so good. “I don’t give a fuck,” Rush panted. “Do you?”

Young’s hands slid down his back, firm over the curve of his spine and the mounds of his buttocks and pulled him in tight. Young’s leg pushed between his, his thigh coming up to raise Rush off his feet as it pressed up into Rush’s bollocks. He made a helpless, high pitched whine because _oh_ God.

“Right now? No, no I don’t.”

The small part of Rush not consumed in thoughts of _oh yes_ , and _more_ , noted that he had somehow let Young take control of this, and decided to rectify that situation at once. His fingers had lost all their dexterity, but he managed to fumble Young’s belt undone at last, and the button of his flies and then the zip. He got his hand inside and curled it around the hot silk and steel urgency of Young’s prick, excitement and pleasure swirling in his stomach, because that was a good handful, sleek and slippery with pre-come and his to use as he wished.

“Oh _fuck_!”

Young tipped his head back against the wall, his mouth wide open, gasping, as he thrust up hard and fast into Rush’s fist, and Rush would have stopped him, would have slowed him down, but it was such a delight to watch him so helpless, held so literally in the palm of Rush’s hand. So instead all he did was lean in and bite that conveniently exposed throat, sucking up a red raw bruise that was going to show everyone, in the morning, that the man had been well and truly claimed.

Young came over his fingers with a long groaning exhalation of breath, stood panting against the wall for a moment until he dropped his head with an apologetic laugh onto Rush’s shoulder. “Sorry. Bit hair trigger there. Wanted... I’ve wanted that for a long time.”

Itchy though he was with need, Rush felt generous enough to let it pass with a mere tug at the bouncy mess of Young’s black hair. “No stopping with half a job done.”

Young laughed again, breathlessly. “No,” he agreed. “No, I got you. You’re okay.”

He suited his actions to his words, sliding his hands down from Rush’s arse to the backs of his thighs, lifting him entirely off the floor. Rush thought about being indignant, but couldn’t summon the fortitude because wow, that was also. That was also kind of...

He wrapped his legs around Young’s waist, his arms around his shoulders, reveling in the feeling of being supported everywhere by that solid muscular body, and he lost the word he’d been trying to think of as Young set him down on the lid of the sarcophagus and sank to the floor between Rush’s spread knees.

High and incredulous in the back of his mind Rush thought, _he wouldn’t really, would he_? The mission commander - he’d think it was too demeaning. They’d fought, they’d fought for so long, he wouldn’t really just...

But all the evidence was trending that way, as Young unbuckled his belt, pushed his trousers down around his hips and freed him from his underwear with a deftly practiced hand. That grip on his prick was the most physical thing Rush had felt in years. He’d got quite out of the habit of thinking of his body, and now here it was, getting its own back, being the only thing left on his mind.

When Young had him exposed, he looked up, still crouched kneeling at Rush’s feet like a supplicant. “Yeah?” he asked, waiting for permission.

“Oh by all means,” Rush waved a lordly hand, “continue.”

Amused, Young’s lips tipped up in a fond little smile that made Rush feel giddy inside. Then he leaned in and licked a broad stripe over the tip of Rush’s prick that immediately started watering in response. He suckled the head into his mouth, and when Rush tried to thrust up, impatient and wild, he pinned Rush’s hips with his hands and made him writhe and shout out and claw at Young’s shoulders until the seams of his jacket creaked.

There followed a long time of wet heat and the tortuous strength of Young’s tongue and throat doing things that he could not spare the attention to parse, and then Young took his hands away and let Rush take over. Let him knot his hands tight in Young’s hair and fuck his mouth hard, too wound up, and too exultant at this final surrender for restraint. He came so hard he thought he would shake himself to pieces, had to slump backwards onto his elbows, his spine having dissolved, making him unable to support himself any other way.

He was never going to disparage physical skills ever again.

After what seemed a long time just gasping, trying to retrieve his mind from wherever it had been scattered, he sat back up, found Young with his eyes closed, his cheek leaning against Rush’s inner thigh, his arms loosely wrapped around Rush’s legs and his hands warm on Rush’s calves, thumbs idly tracing the backs of his knees. He had never thought of his lower legs as being somewhere that cried out for a lover’s touch, so it surprised him how pleasant that was, in this state of warm lethargic bliss.

He wound his fingers back into Young’s hair. Young looked up, his small smile a touch smugger than it had been.

“You okay?”

“I am marvelous.”

“You might be right about that,” Young laughed, stretching. He commenced the process of hauling himself to his feet, while Rush tidied himself away and wondered what happened next.

“Goddamn, I need a shower.”

“Whoever thought black was a good color for that uniform was not thinking of situations like these.”

Young grinned. “No kidding,” but he watched Rush get to his feet as if he had more to say. As if he didn’t know how to say it.

Rush wasn’t sure how to say it either. “Well, I’d better be about my work. I have a lot to catch up on after these past weeks.”

The unsaid words thickened in the air around them. Even Rush’s thoughts could not complete themselves. ‘Thank you’ seemed trite. ‘This went a lot better than I would have thought’ critical and liable to misinterpretation. It seemed wrong to answer Young’s generosity with silence but he could not think of anything to say that would do better. Annoyed at himself, he turned towards the door, and Young caught him by the elbow again, stopped him.

“You’ll come by later?”

“I... ah,” he looked away, careful not to interpret this as more than it was. “I’m not a young man any more. Once a day is probably your lot.”

“I meant...” Rush risked a glance, caught Young ducking his head, hiding his face, like he was nervous too. “I meant, to sleep. It gets kinda... It gets kind of lonely at night, and I thought if we were... then...”

Another upheaval. It had the taste of the final ending point of this trajectory they had been on, more intimate than friendship or even than sex, and he didn’t know if he was ready for that. He had barely been ready for this. “I’ll think about it,” he said, and escaped.

But it came with him.

He didn’t dwell on it more than once or twice a minute as he checked the science team’s recent work, figured out a way of increasing their power reserves and then wondered if he should disclose it. He managed to forget the problem altogether while he guided Brody and Volker through the snarled mess of melted circuitry that was preventing the door at TQ-30 from opening and letting them through to reclaim a whole new level of engineering section.

But it returned when they excused themselves at the end of their shift. It returned when he found himself at his own door, looking in at his own bed. He took two automatic steps into the room and felt its atmosphere of isolation and nightmares close like a trap around him. Sitting on the bed nevertheless, he got one boot off, put his toes in his worn sock down on the chilly decking and felt misery squeeze his heart in long blue spindly fingers.

A few minutes later, without knocking, he hit the door control outside Young’s room and strode straight in, closing it behind him. Young had been asleep, an indistinct lump in the bed under the dim blue and ever changing phosphorescence of the passing starlight, but as Rush’s eyes adjusted to the low light, Young raised himself to one elbow and looked at Rush with the blurry incomprehension of someone whose body is awake but whose mind hasn’t quite caught up yet.

It was a state with which he knew the man was very familiar.

Young’s hair was comically flattened on one side, but Rush couldn’t find anything to criticize in the smile that broke out in delighted brilliance on his face when he finally figured out what was going on.

“Hey,” Young said quietly, and flicked the covers of the bed open in invitation.

“Hey,” Rush replied, already toeing off his boots, his cheeks aching for some reason. He shed his waistcoat and top shirt on the way, dropped his jeans on the floor beside the bed and crawled in.

“Thought you weren’t coming,” said Young, shifting his legs so that Rush could tuck his cold toes between his ankles. He wore only boxers and an undershirt, and he gave off heat like a furnace. Rush plastered himself close with a groan as every atom in his body seemed to sigh with relief.

“I thought I wasn’t either,” Rush admitted, fitting his face into Young’s neck, where an eyeful of the deep wine-colored bruise he had given the man earlier filled him with the satisfaction of a job well done.

Young wormed a bare arm under his neck and wriggled a little so that Rush’s weight settled more comfortably into him. “’S there a problem?”

“No,” Rush murmured, in complete unguarded honesty. _Safe_ , said his body, insistently. _Home. Sleep_. Despite all the caveats, the bad memories, the misconceptions, he was more than willing to believe it, more than willing to let it all go forever more.

His heavy eyes shut all by themselves and he fell headlong into a state of warm and weightless happiness, such as he had not felt in years.

“Between you and me? There’s not a problem that isn’t solved.”


	23. Chapter 23

Young came awake by slow degrees. One rung at a time, he climbed out of hazy daylit dreams and emerged into familiar, endless starlight. At first he was only aware of warmth and contentment and the pleasurable ache of recent exertion. Then his senses alerted him to the presence of a wiry arm flung across his chest and slender fingers holding his bicep in a loose grip. One of his legs was similarly restrained, caught between a pair of lean thighs. He could feel a whisper of breath across his cheek. Fine, feather-soft hairs - so different from his own coarse curls - tickled his neck. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling until they adjusted to the rippling, glittering twilight. Then he turned his head on the pillow and drank in the sight of his lover.

Rush was beautiful in sleep. The lines about his eyes and mouth were softened, almost blurred, and there was something very youthful and sweet about the upward tilt of his wide lips. His hair, silvered by starlight, was fanned out across the pillow. His eyelids fluttered now and then, but never opened fully. He lay on his side, facing Young, and while his other limbs were busy clinging, monkey-like, to Young’s body, his free arm was tucked up under their shared pillow. Young smiled, charmed by the incongruous picture he made. Vulnerable, ageless, stubborn, rugged, star-touched. An endless parade of contradictions manifesting in the form of one Doctor Nicholas Rush, and he was in Young’s bed.

The sensation of Rush’s fingers curled possessively around his arm reminded Young of the breathless moment when Rush had reached out to cup his cheek. A small intimacy, no more significant, perhaps, than when Rush had cleaned Young’s face after their skirmish with Dunning and Co., but in that moment, when by all appearances Rush had been girding himself for a fight, that tender touch had been like balm on an open wound. Young had savored it, knowing that it could be withdrawn at any moment and never repeated.

He had not expected the kiss. He had not expected soft lips and hot breath and six days’ growth of beard upbraiding his skin. He had not expected hands clutching and tugging at his hair. And he certainly had not expected any of the frantic, delirious pleasures that had followed.

In memory, the scene took on a dreamlike quality. It was painted over with the gloss of hindsight, which turned the improbable into the inevitable. And yet Young still wasn’t sure he believed it.

Aboard Destiny, dreams had a way of feeling very real.

That thought - that wasn’t a good thought. Young immediately wished he could take it back, stuff it down into the bottom of a secret mental lockbox and never set it free again. Unease began to seep in at the edges of his rose-tinted reverie. He couldn’t help thinking about his conversation with Riley and remembering how much damage a well-meaning starship was capable of.

As Rush began to stir beside him, Young eyed him with diminishing hope. It would be just his luck to get everything he wanted, only to realize that it had all been a well-intentioned lie.

“Are you real?” he whispered.

Rush stilled. His brow puckered. Then he opened his eyes and stared at Young with a mixture of confusion and incredulity. “What was that?” he murmured, his voice still rough with sleep.

“Are you real?”

Rush blinked slowly, processing the question. He still had that cute little wrinkle between his brows, and Young was tempted to kiss it, but he refrained. He wanted to be assured of Rush’s actual presence before he took advantage of his close proximity. Or at least… Well, if this was a dream, he probably wouldn’t be able to resist taking advantage of it anyway; he would enjoy the fantasy while he could. But he wanted to _know_.

“Is that question meant to be literal, or philosophical?” Rush asked after a moment.

“Literal.”

Rush’s eyes sharpened and he began to look vaguely amused. He lifted his head from the pillow, arched his back, and stretched the kinks out of his neck. Then he withdrew his arm from under the pillow and used it to prop himself up. His hair shrouded his eyes, but Young could see the suggestion of a smile curving his lips. “I can think of several answers off the top of my head,” he said, “but I don’t think you’ll find any of them useful. May I ask why you think I’m not real?”

His tone was gentle, and Young found himself unaccountably soothed by it. But not convinced.

“Well…” Young started and then broke off, not sure how to voice his suspicions without sounding foolish. He came to the conclusion that foolishness was unavoidable, and continued. “This all seems a bit too good to be true. And… and it occurred to me that Destiny has some strange ideas about how to be… helpful.”

Rush’s lips parted in a silent ‘oh.’ He tossed his hair back from his eyes and then fixed him with a gaze so overflowing with affection that Young’s heart gave a lurch of deep, desperate yearning.

_Please be real…_

“You think this is a simulation,” Rush said.

Young nodded helplessly.

Rush was insensitive enough to laugh at that. He deftly disentangled their limbs and climbed on top of Young, letting him bear his modest weight. Then he folded his arms across Young’s chest and propped his chin on them. His cat-like grin suggested that he was enjoying some delightful joke. “You know,” he said, “nothing I say will prove or disprove that theory.”

“You don’t have to look like you’re getting such a kick out of this,” Young said, slightly nettled.

Still, this… this felt nice. A warm body pressing him into the mattress. Whiskey-colored eyes, full of life and mirth and fondness, gazing into his. It _almost_ made up for his current existential quandary and the certainty that he was being amiably mocked. Almost.

Young lifted a hand and ran it lightly over Rush’s back. He could feel the heat of his skin through the thin material of his white t-shirt. It certainly _seemed_ real enough, but he knew from experience that his five senses weren’t necessarily trustworthy.

At Young’s touch, Rush made a soft, throaty sound. He curled and uncurled his fingers so that his nails scraped lightly across the front of Young’s undershirt - kneading it with his claws, just like a cat. “You’ll be fine,” he murmured, and bent his head forward to kiss the worn fabric stretched over Young’s chest.

Young grunted in disbelief, but he started to feel lulled in spite of himself. It had been so long since he had enjoyed such closeness or such sweet little intimacies. He wanted to banish his uncertainty and bask in soft touches and shared body heat. He wanted to lose himself in this gentle, languid pleasure. The drowsy satisfaction he had felt on awakening began to creep over him again.

Then Rush’s voice pulled him back. “You know as well as I do that Destiny can’t maintain a simulation this detailed without sacrificing other systems. Within a few days you’ll know for certain.”

“A few days?” Young echoed. Shit. Was Rush just teasing him now, or was he serious? “How many days are we talking? If I’m stuck in a simulation for a week, I could die of dehydration before I’m sure either way.”

“Hmm, yes. Well, that would be pretty conclusive evidence that it _is_ a simulation, I suppose.”

Yeah, Rush was definitely teasing him. Young shot him an unamused look. “You are completely unhelpful.”

“Mmm,” Rush acknowledged, crawling his way up Young’s body and then bracing himself with a hand on either side of Young’s head. He stared down at Young from under a curtain of graying hair. His lips were quirked into an ironical half-smile, no longer quite so open and pleased as before, and the expression in his eyes had turned serious. “And _you_ are so used to being downtrodden that you just can’t accept happiness when it’s handed to you.”

Young swallowed, partly because Rush’s words rang so true, and partly because Rush’s groin was now aligned with his own, and two thin layers of fabric were not quite enough to disguise their mutual interest. He started to squirm, stopped himself, and forced his thoughts back to the conversation.

“Yeah,” he said gruffly, “I know that. But what’s gotten into you, then? Since when are you this happy?”

Rush gave a soft huff of laughter and some of the warmth returned to his gaze. “If you think I’m never happy, then you’ve not been paying attention. I could list a dozen things that make me happy on a regular basis.”

“Yeah? Then why are you such an ass to everyone all the time?”

“Well, people rarely make the list.”

Young rolled his eyes, but he had to smile too. If this was a simulation, then Destiny’s version of Rush was pretty convincing. A bit softened, certainly more amenable to physical contact, but still clever and arrogant and cynically amused by the foibles of others. Was Destiny’s understanding of human psychology really good enough to pull this off? Young was starting to have doubts. Destiny’s Riley had been good, but Young had still seen through him pretty quickly. He hadn’t caught on during the no-win scenario, but it wasn’t as if he’d had time to sit down with any of his simulated crew members for a nice long chat. If he had done so, would he have noticed inconsistencies in their personalities? Would they have said things they wouldn’t normally say, acted in ways they wouldn’t normally act? It seemed probable. And yet here was Rush, being very... Rush-like. It was rather encouraging.

“So, do I make the list?” Young asked, expecting a flippant answer.

What he got instead was a reproachful smile and a mild, “Isn’t it obvious?”

Young drew in a breath and let it out slowly in an effort to soothe the flutter of hope that seemed to have possessed his heart. Such undependable things, hearts. “Why?” he asked when he had air enough to speak.

“Because you’ve earned my trust.”

Young blinked at him, bemused. Yes, he had earned Rush’s trust. That wasn’t news. That had been established days ago at the meeting on Earth. And Young was absolutely grateful for it. He appreciated what they had achieved together, the steps they had taken, the friendship they had founded. But it seemed like a giant leap from trust and friendship to… to whatever was happening right now in Young’s bed. This joy and sweetness and pleasure. This happiness. Surely it couldn’t be boiled down to mere trust? He must be missing something here.

“Is that all?” he asked.

Rush made a soft humming noise and nodded as if he had been expecting Young’s question. “I figure it ought to be enough,” he said candidly, “taking into account that only two other people have ever managed to earn my complete trust, and that I loved them both.”

At that, Young’s wayward heart seemed to go offline altogether. Or perhaps it was his lungs that had ceased to function - he certainly felt breathless and dizzy. “Oh,”  he said, because he could not think of anything else to say. There didn’t seem to be anything he _could_ say - not if he didn’t want this conversation to dissolve into the sort of awkward sentimentality that would send them both scrambling to escape.

It was not a declaration of love. Not _quite_. But damn, it was close, and Young found himself envying the casual way in which Rush had dropped that powerful word into the conversation as if it meant nothing in particular. As if it could be taken for granted. As if it hadn’t just shattered Young’s world and rebuilt it stronger, brighter, more colorful than before.

Fuck it. This had to be real. Only Rush could be so magnificently unpredictable. Only Rush knew how to turn Young’s worldview upside down and inside out and make him like it. Young had inhabited Rush’s body, dreamed Rush’s memories, felt the electric current of Rush’s thoughts. He should be able to recognize him by now.

Rush smirked as if he could read Young’s mind, and it suddenly seemed imperative that Young kiss those smiling lips. He cupped the back of Rush’s head, threaded his fingers through his long hair, and exerted gentle pressure until Rush took the hint and swooped down to meet Young’s mouth. Young groaned, relishing the contrasting sensations of Rush’s soft lips and prickly scruff. When Rush’s lips parted, Young licked into his mouth, feeling dizzy and eager and elated. Rush made a soft sound of approval. He allowed Young to control the kiss for a few seconds longer before taking over, and that was good too. That was delightful, in fact. Because Rush’s potent blend of passion and aggression and imperious charm was not like anything Young had encountered before, and he _loved_ it.

When they broke apart, panting for air, Rush wormed a hand into Young’s mess of curls and tugged lightly. “So? What’s the verdict?” he asked teasingly. “Am I real?”

“I think so,” Young said with a lazy smile. “If not, I think I’ll keep you anyway.”

Rush kissed Young’s neck just at the edge of his jawline and whispered in his ear, “Very wise.”

Young shivered.

“What time is it?” Rush murmured.

Young retrieved his watch from the bedside table. “Just after 0700 hours.”

“Meeting with Camile at eight,” Rush reminded him before stroking his tongue over the purple bruise on Young’s neck.

Young grunted and closed his eyes. He had forgotten about the meeting. For a moment he almost found himself wishing that this _was_ a simulation, just so that he could enjoy it without worrying about interruptions or obligations. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to let Rush leave. Feeling rebellious, he deliberately arched into Rush’s body, causing their cocks to rub together through their underwear. He was pleased to find that Rush was every bit as hard as he was.

Rush made a strangled sound. “P-plenty of time,” he gasped into Young’s neck.

“Think so?” rumbled Young, thrilled at Rush’s reaction.

“Oh, definitely.” Rush lifted his head and looked down at Young with eyes that were nearly black with desire. He licked his lips provocatively, and Young shivered again.

Shifting his weight slightly, Rush braced his upper body with his left hand, palm flat against the mattress just above Young’s shoulder. Then, wriggling in a way that made Young tremble, he worked his other hand between their bodies. He caught the top of Young’s boxers with his thumb and tugged them them down, and his own underwear soon followed. Then his long fingers encircled both of their cocks in a firm grip.

And _yes,_ that was so much better. No barriers. Just heat and skin on sweat-slick skin. Young rolled his hips and savored the silky slide of his cock against Rush’s. _Perfect_. Rush seemed to agree, moaning appreciatively as he moved in counterpoint to Young.

Their pace was slow at first. They both seemed set on drawing it out, relishing the gentle friction. But their speed gradually increased in proportion to their need. As he grew more desperate, Young thrust harder and faster into Rush’s fist, and Rush matched his rhythm with short, quick strokes of his hand. Young could feel himself getting close, and Rush sounded like he was teetering right on the brink. The _noises_ he was making were intoxicating. Soft and breathy and high-pitched, full of urgency and muffled joy. Young wondered if Rush even knew he was making them, or if he was so caught up in sensation that he was completely unaware of anything else.

Rush’s steady stream of moans and whimpers culminated in a sharp, broken cry, and then Young felt the warm stickiness of Rush’s come splatter over his belly and add to the slipperiness of his cock. Rush’s rhythm faltered as he shuddered through the aftershocks. He rested his forehead briefly against Young’s shoulder and heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction.

Young began to squirm under him, feeling wild and needy and so, _so_ close. There was a soft chuckle from Rush, breathless and fond. Then he adjusted his grip on Young’s cock and started again with those fast, deft strokes. Young was coming within moments. He arched into the sensation, overwhelmed and electrified and so deeply grateful. He forgot to breathe, and his resulting lightheadedness just added to the reckless thrill of it. When it was over, he slumped back against the mattress with a pathetic little whine that drew another laugh from Rush.

As he drifted in the golden haze of afterglow, Young watched Rush wipe up their mess with the edge of the bedsheet. That task done, Rush flopped back down on top of him and worked his fingers into Young’s hair. Young waited for the inevitable tug on his curls and grinned when it came a moment later. He was amused to find that this habit was apparently going to continue, even now that the curls no longer belonged to Rush.

“Those are attached to my head, you know,” Young pointed out.

“Oh, I’m aware,” Rush said. “I suspect the root system is quite extensive. Occupies no little space in here.” He gave Young’s skull a gentle rap.

“Nice,” muttered Young.

Rush just smiled.

“We really need showers,” Young said.

“Mmm.”

“And breakfast.”

“Debatable.”

Young grasped Rush’s waist and twisted, flipping them onto their sides. “No, not debatable,” he grunted, reaching up to remove Rush’s clutching hands from his hair. “I definitely need breakfast.”

Rush shook his own hair out of his eyes and heaved a sigh, as if he found Young’s desire for sustenance tedious.

They climbed out of bed and dressed in silence. Young occasionally shot a glance in Rush’s direction, watching the brisk way in which he tugged on his clothes and finger-combed his long hair. He was fully clothed and standing patiently by the door before Young had had time to do more than pull on his pants and reach for his jacket. Young wasn’t even sure why Rush was waiting for him, but it prompted him to move a little faster, to take a little less care with his uniform than usual. He was just going to the showers anyway. What did a few wrinkles matter?

Rush intercepted him as he approached the doorway, seizing the front of Young’s jacket and maneuvering him up against the nearest wall. Young let himself be manhandled and was rewarded with one last slow, searing kiss. Then Rush pulled away, grinning cheekily as he hit the door control. He strolled off down the hallway without a word, leaving Young to stare after him with what must be a ridiculously besotted expression on his face.

_Oh, yeah_ , Young thought in a blissful daze, _I’m_ _in the best kind of trouble now._


End file.
